Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (25 February 1877 - 28 November 1935) was an
AustriaAustria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
n ethnomusicologist and scholar of music. He is remembered for his pioneering work in the field of ethnomusicology, and for the Sachs–Hornbostel system of
musical instrument classificationAt various times, and in various cultures, various schemes of musical instrument classification have been used.The most commonly used system in use in the west today divides instruments into string instruments, wind instruments and percussion instruments...
which he co-authored with
Curt SachsCurt Sachs was a German-born but American-domiciled musicologist. He was one of the founders of modern organology , and is probably best remembered today for co-authoring the Sachs-Hornbostel scheme of musical instrument classification with his fellow scholar Erich von Hornbostel.Born in Berlin,...
.
Life
Hornbostel was born in
ViennaVienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
into a musical family. The House of
HornbostelHornbostel may refer to:* Hornbostel-Sachs, a classification system for musical instruments* Erich Moritz von Hornbostel , Austrian ethnomusicologist* Henry Hornbostel , American architect...
is a Saxon nobility. He studied the
pianoThe piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
,
harmonyIn music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...
and
counterpointIn music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent . It has been most commonly identified in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...
as a child, but his PhD at the University of Vienna was in
chemistryChemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
. He moved to
BerlinBerlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, where he fell under the influence of
Carl StumpfCarl Stumpf was a German philosopher and psychologist.Born in Wiesentheid, he studied with Franz Brentano and Hermann Lotze...
and worked with him on musical psychology and
psychoacousticsPsychoacoustics is the scientific study of sound perception. More specifically, it is the branch of science studying the psychological and physiological responses associated with sound...
. He was Stumpf's assistant at the Berlin Psychological Institute, and when the archives of the Institute were used as the basis for the
Berliner Phonogramm-ArchivThe term Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv is used to refer to:*A collection of ethnomusicological recordings or world music, mostly on phonographs assembled since 1900 in Berlin, Germany and*The institution that assembled these recordings....
, he became its first director in 1905. It was during his time there that he worked with Curt Sachs to produce the Sachs–Hornbostel system of musical instrument classification (published 1914).
In 1933, he was sacked from all his posts by the Nazi Party because his mother was a Jew. He moved first to
SwitzerlandSwitzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
, then the United States, and finally to
CambridgeThe city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
in England, where he worked on an archive of non-European
folk musicFolk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....
recordings. He died there in 1935.
Contributions
Hornbostel did much work in the field of
ethnomusicologyEthnomusicology is defined as "the study of social and cultural aspects of music and dance in local and global contexts."Coined by the musician Jaap Kunst from the Greek words ἔθνος ethnos and μουσική mousike , it is often considered the anthropology or ethnography of music...
, then usually referred to as
comparative musicology. In 1906, he was in America to study the music and psychology of the Pawnee people, native Americans in the state of
OklahomaOklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...
; he had by that time already studied the native music of Tunisia and of South Sea Islanders.
A highly regarded teacher, Hornbostel's students included American composer
Henry CowellHenry Cowell was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s:...
. Hornbostel specialized in African and Asian music, making many recordings and developing a system that facilitated the transcription of non-Western music from recordings to paper. He saw the
musical tuningIn music, there are two common meanings for tuning:* Tuning practice, the act of tuning an instrument or voice.* Tuning systems, the various systems of pitches used to tune an instrument, and their theoretical bases.-Tuning practice:...
s used by various cultural groups as an essential element in determining the character of their music, and did much work in comparing different tunings. A lot of this work has been criticized since, but in its time, this was a rarely explored area. Hornbostel also argued that music should be a part of more general
anthropologicalAnthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
research.
Hornbostel also contributed to the theory of binaural hearing, proposing the theory of
interaural time differenceThe interaural time difference when concerning humans or animals, is the difference in arrival time of a sound between two ears. It is important in the localisation of sounds, as it provides a cue to the direction or angle of the sound source from the head. If a signal arrives at the head from one...
as the main cue, and developing
sound localizationSound localization refers to a listener's ability to identify the location or origin of a detected sound in direction and distance. It may also refer to the methods in acoustical engineering to simulate the placement of an auditory cue in a virtual 3D space .The sound localization mechanisms of the...
devices (for finding the directions to artillery, aircraft, submarines, etc.) for the German war effort during
World War IWorld War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. With
Max Wertheimer- External links :* * * * *...
, he developed a directional listening device that they referred to as the
Wertbostel.
Selected works
- Hornbostel, Erich M. von. 1910. Über vergleichende akustische und musikpsychologische Untersuchungen. Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 5: 143-167
- Stumpf, C. and E. v. Hornbostel. 1911. Über die Bedeutung ethnologischer Untersuchungen für die Psychologie und Ästhetik der Tonkunst. Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 6: 102-115
- Hornbostel, E. v. 1913. Über ein akustisches Kriterium für Kulturzusammenhänge. Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 7: 1-20
- Erich M. v. Hornbostel and Curt Sachs: Systematik der Musikinstrumente. Ein Versuch. In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie. Band 46, 1914, Heft 4–5, S. 553–590.
- Beobachtungen über ein- und zweiohriges Hören. In: Zeitschrift für Psychologie und ihre Grenzwissenschaften. Band 4, 1923, S. 64–114.
External links
- Short biography with links on digitized sources in the Virtual Laboratory
The online project Virtual Laboratory. Essays and Resources on the Experimentalization of Life, 1830-1930, located at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, is dedicated to research in the history of the experimentalization of life...
of the Max Planck Institute for the History of ScienceThe Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin was established in March 1994. Its research is primarily devoted to a theoretically oriented history of science, principally of the natural sciences, but with methodological perspectives drawn from the cognitive sciences and from...