Music Archaeology up to the 1960s
Brass instruments underwent monumental changes in the mid nineteenth century with the adoption of valves and one of the workers in the field at the time was Victor-Charles Mahillon, a Belgian musician, instrument builder and writer on musical topics. Coming from a family of instrument makers, he went on to develop many instruments but also created analogues of ancient ones such as the cornua found in Pompeii. He founded and curated the Musée instrumental du Conservatoire Royal de Musique which went on to become the Musical Instrument Museum in Brussels. Such workers added progressively to the knowledge of instruments and were key players in the formation of the discipline known today as music archaeology.
Organising Instruments in Collections
In 1914, Hornbostel & Sachs collaborated to publish a taxonomy for musical instruments which was largely based upon work by Victor Mahillon and earlier workers. This was written with the intention of providing a guide for museum curators who had instruments in their collections so that they could present them in an appropriate way.This model has been adopted and expanded on by MIMO (Musical Instrument Museums Online). Unfortunately, the underlying premise of the categorisation is predicated upon the idea that modern and recent musical instruments can adequately inform our interpretation of the instrumentarium of the ancient world. My experience with brass instruments from such distant times suggests to me that this is simply not the case. A further difficulty which I would associate with the work of MIMO is the adoption of the term labrosone to describe brass instruments in general. This was coined by Anthony Baines and was (deliberately or not) aimed at enshrining a pseudo-classical term in the brass world in an attempt to elevate the status of those applying this term. It is my position that the imposition of such aterm on the study of brass instruments can do nothing other that further separate the literature from the non-specialist reader who is au fait with the terms in general use and happy to leave the classicists to perambulate around their own world.