Erich Moritz von Hornbostel

Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, born on February 25, 1877 in Vienna, died on November 28, 1935 in Cambridge, England, was an Austrian ethnomusicologist and director of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv from 1906 to 1933. In 1914, together with the musicologist Curt Sachs the Hornbostel-Sachs system for the classification of musical instruments.

Life

His parents ran a large house in Vienna, where H. came into contact with music and musicians of the time, including Brahms, at an early age. Despite his inclination and talent for music and early training by outstanding musicians, Hornbostel studied natural sciences and obtained his doctorate in chemistry in Heidelberg as a student of →Bunsen. Around 1900, he came to Berlin and worked under Carl Stumpf at the university’s Institute of Psychology.

As his assistant, he joined the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in 1901, where, together with Stumpf and Otto Abraham, he encouraged explorers and missionaries to record the songs of non-European peoples on phonograph cylinders and to transcribe and analyze the rapidly growing number of cylinders returned to the archive. The results of these investigations were published as supplements to the collectors’ research reports or as articles in ethnological and musicological journals. H. thus became the founder of the method of “comparative musicology” (today called “musical ethnology” or “ethnomusicology”).

Even before the First World War, the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv occupied the leading position in this young science alongside the one in Vienna, as whose first authority H. gained international recognition (professorship in 1917). In 1923, the archive, which he had previously maintained from his own funds, became state property. In 1933, H. emigrated first to Switzerland and then to the USA, where he was appointed by the New School of Social Research in New York. As the climate did not suit his health, he moved to England in 1935, where he was appointed to the University of Cambridge. But even there, his condition deteriorated and he was no longer able to continue teaching.

The greatest impact of the founder of a new field of musicology was not so much his countless smaller writings on music comparison, sound psychology, acoustics and other scientific and humanistic fields, but rather the training of a large number of talented students and colleagues all over the world.

His students and collaborators included George Herzog, Mieczislaw Kolinski, Henry Cowell, Fritz Bose, Walter Wiora, Marius Schneider, Hans Hickamnn, and friends such as Kurt Lachmann, Curt Sachs, Jaap Kunst, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály and Ilmari Krohn continued his “Berlin School” of ethnomusicology and had a stimulating effect in Europe and America.

Works

• u. a. Stud. ü. d. Tonsystem u. d. Musik d. Japaner (with O. Abraham), in: Sammelbde. d. Internat. Musikges. IV, 1903;
• Phonographierte ind. Melodien (with dems.), ibid. V, 1904;
• Phonographed tunes. Melodies, ibid. VIII, 1906/07;
• Phonographed türk. Melodien (with dems.), in: Zs. f. Ethnol. 36, 1904;
• Phonographierte Indianermelodien aus Brit.-Columbia (with dems.), in: F. Boas Anniversary Volume,1906, these all also repr. in: Sammelbde. f. vgl. Musikwiss. I, 1922;
• Die Probleme d. vgl. Musikwiss., in: Zs. d. Internat. Musikges. 7, 1905/06;
  Über vgl. akust. u. musikpsycholog. Unteres, (with C. Stumpf), in: C. Stumpf, Dtrr. z. Akustik u. Musikwiss. IV-V, 1910;
• About an acoust. Kriterium f. Kulturzusammenhänge, in: Zs. f. Ethnol., 1911;
• Systematik d. Musikinstrumente (with C. Sachs), ibid. 46, 1914;
• Die Musik auf d. nordwestl. Salomo-Inseln, in: R. Thurnwald, Salomo-Inseln u. Bismarck-Archipel I, 1912;
  Melodie u. Skala, in: lb. Petro 19, 1912;
• Die Musik d. Pangwe, in: G. Tessmann, Die Pangwe II, 1914;
• Musik d. Makushi, Taulipang u. Yekuana, in: Th. Koch-Grünberg, Vom Roroima zum Orinoco III, 1923;
• Die Musik d. Semai auf Malakka, in: Anthropos 21, 1926;
• Psychol. d. Gehörserscheinungen, in: Hdb. d. Physiol. XI, 1926;
• Musical. Tonsysteme, in: Geiger u. Scheel, Hdb. d. Physik VIII, 1927;
• African Negro Music, in: Africa I, 1928;
• The Ethnol. of African Sound Instruments, ibid. VI, 1933;
• Musik d. Orients, 12 records with commentary H., C. Lindström AG Berlin 1928;
• The Music of the Fuegians, Ethnos, 1948 – Complete edition in preparation

Publications

• The problems of comparative musicology. In: Christian Kaden, Erich Stockmann (eds.): Tonart und Ethos. Essays on ethnomusicology and music psychology. 1905 (Reclam, Leipzig 1986)
• Section XX: Music. In: Günther Tessmann: The Pangwe. Ethnological monograph of a West African Negro tribe. Results of the Lübeck Pangwe expedition 1907-1909 and earlier research 1904-1907. vol. 2. Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin 1913, pp. 320-357.
• with Curt Sachs: Systematics of musical instruments. An attempt. In: Journal of Ethnology. Vol. 46, 1914, pp. 553-590 (digitized version).
• Observations on one- and two-ear hearing. In: Zeitschrift für Psychologie und ihre Grenzwissenschaften. Volume 4, 1923, pp. 64-114.
• The Unity of the Senses. In: Psyche, 7, No. 28, 1927, pp. 83-89.
• Klaus Wachsmann, Dieter Christensen, Hans-Peter Reinecke (eds.): Hornbostel Opera Omnia. Volume 1, Springer, Berlin 1975 (contains all published writings from 1903 to 1906)

Literature

• Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, Curt Sachs: Systematics of musical instruments. An attempt. Journal of Ethnology 46/4 and 5 (1914): 553-590.
• Jaap Kunst: On the death of Erich von Hornbostel. In: Anthropos. Volume 32, Issue 1-2 (January – April 1937), pp. 239-246.
• Curt Sachs: Erich M. von Hornbostel 1875-1935, in: Die Musikforschung, 1st year, issue 4 (1948), pp. 217-218.
• Hornbostel Erich von. In: Austrian Biographical Dictionary 1815-1950 (ÖBL). Volume 2, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1959, p. 423.
• Fritz Bose: Hornbostel, Erich M. von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7, p. 633 f. (digitized version).
• Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy: The Beginnings of Organology and Ethnomusicology in the West: V. Mahillon, A. Ellis and S. M. Tagore, in: Sue Carole DeVale (ed.), Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology Vol. VIII: Issues in Organology, Los Angeles: University of California (1990), 67-80.
• Sebastian Klotz (ed.): “Vom tönenden Wirbel menschlichen Tuns”: Erich M. von Hornbostel als Gestaltpsychologe, Archivar und Musikwissenschaftler: Studien und Dokumente. Schibri, Berlin 1998, ISBN 9783928878555.
• Lars-Christian Koch and Ricarda Kopal: Classification of Musical Instruments – On the 100th Anniversary of the Hornbostel-Sachs System, in: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 139/2 (2014), 281-302