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Inventaire original MEG. Registres tapuscrits, volumes 19 à 59
Registres_tapuscrits/45055.pdf
In a study based on the MEG collection, published in 1919, the anthropologist and doctor Georges Montandon attempted to trace the origins and descent of musical instruments throughout the world. He grouped the instruments in ensembles, presented as plates of photographs and drawings. The study ends with a geographical sketch map showing the distribution of different types of instruments across the world.
As the study was read in scientific circles, the MEG’s instrument collection, classified in this manner, was widely quoted and used by researchers working on rational classification. The diffusionist approach was later abandoned to the benefit of comparative organology and contextual inventories.
Drums and idiophones, instruments whose sound comes from the vibration of the rigid material they are made of, were long grouped together in the “percussion” family. This term referred to an empirical classification inherited from antique symbolic thinking, which divided musical instruments into three categories: string, wind and percussion.
Research in this field since the nineteenth century has shown the inadequacy of this approach and developed a universally applicable classification system based solely on the instruments’ acoustic functioning. Drums are now put in a separate class known as membranophones.
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