Prof. Erich von Hornbostel
1936; Nature Portfolio; Volume: 137; Issue: 3453 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1038/137014b0
ISSN1476-4687
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Musicological Studies
ResumoTHE death of Prof. Erich von Hornbostel at Cambridge on November 28 is a great loss to the small body of students of comparative music. He was born in Vienna fifty-eight years ago. After specialising in chemistry at the Universities of Vienna, Heidelberg and Berlin, he settled in Berlin where in 1901 he began his studies in physiology, psychology, anthropology and ethnology, which laid the foundation of his life's work in ‘musicology’, as the Germans term it. With Stumpf and Abraham, he began in 1903 to collect and to analyse phonographic and gramophone records of primitive music, accurately determining the pitch of the notes sung and of the musical instruments employed. He was able to show that the pan-pipes and the harmonica, despite their wide wanderings, retain the same pitch, the former in Melanesia and Brazil, the latter in Burma and Africa. He ascribed this remarkable constancy in part to the influence of the memory of absolute pitch in primitive man.
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