European, British, and American Musical Instrument Collectors, 1850–1940

Christina Linsenmeyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040184202
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The contributors to this volume examine musical instrument collectors and their reasons and means for collecting: Who were they professionally and personally? Why did they collect musical instruments? How did they acquire their objects? What were their collecting criteria and aesthetics?

Following a critical introduction, two chapters on historically overlooked yet essential themes – provenance and collecting in the context of colonialism – lay the foundation for nineteen chapters, each focusing on an individual collector, telling personal and individual stories of collecting and collections. These narratives illuminate a rich contextual history, including the factors that shaped each collector's acquisition and use of objects. Because many private collections later became the mainstay of institutional ones, this volume holds that it is essential to understand these collectors and historical collecting practices, in order to understand our museum collections today.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in material culture, collecting and museum studies, music history, and organology.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editor
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Collecting African Musical Instruments during the Colonisation Era: The Case of the Congo
• 2 Provenance and Instruments of the Violin Family
• 3 From ‘Scoundrel’ to Professor: The Legacy of John Donaldson (c. 1788–1865) and the Founding of the University of Edinburgh’s Musical Instrument Collection
• 4 Carl Engel (1818–1882): ‘The Highest Authority in Europe Upon the Development of Musical Instruments’
• 5 Adolphe Sax’s (1814–1894) Collection of Musical Instruments: ‘The Rare Museum of an Artist and Inventor’
• 6 Alfred Hill (1862–1940) and Arthur Hill (1860–1939): Private Collectors, Public Benefactors
• 7 César Charles Snoeck (1834–1898): Making the Intangible, Tangible
• 8 Daniel Sargent Pillsbury (1836–1902): First Collector of American Band Instruments
• 9 Collecting Musical Instruments: A Merchant’s Passion. The Rück Family Collection (c. 1880–1962)
• 10 Mary Elizabeth Adams Brown (1842–1918): A Herculean Piece of Work
• 11 Auguste Tolbecque’s (1830–1919) Collection: A New Aesthetic Order and the Experimental Archaeology of Musical Instruments
• 12 Celebrating the Art of Musical-Instrument Making: The Private Collection of Victor-Charles Mahillon (1841–1924)
• 13 Carl Claudius (1855–1931) and His Sound-Chests
• 14 ‘No Mere Assemblage of Musical Instruments’: The Foundations of Arnold Dolmetsch’s (1858–1940) Collection
• 15 Dayton C. Miller (1866–1941), an American Collector of Flutes
• 16 George Henry Benton Fletcher (1866–1944), The Improbable Collector
• 17 Francis W. Galpin (1858–1945): The Canon and Collector
• 18 Henry Ford (1863–1947): Gathering America’s Musical Past
• 19 Fritz Wildhagen (1878–1956): Painter, Collector, Aesthete
• 20 Evan Gorga (1865–1957): An Extraordinary Collector, His Incredible Collections and Their Disastrous Odyssey
• 21 Curt Sachs (1881–1959) as Head of the Collection of Musical Instruments in Berlin: Views and Perspectives
• Index