Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good bright condition. Some tanning and marking due to age. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Most of the studies assembled here grew out of my work at the Metro- politan Museum of Art for whose splendid collection of musical instruments I have as Curator been responsible since 1941. Preserving repairing and exhibiting instruments studying purchases and gifts and organizing museum concerts of forgotten masterworks using instruments of their periods provided no end of incentive to research. Another stimulus came from the continual questioning by friends in the fields of the history of art and of music. In this age of intense interest in iconology art historians seek information about instru- ments as traditional attributes of allegorical figures as integral elements of mythical and religious beliefs and images and as telling tools of social customs and traditions. In trying to answer these questions it was necessary to view the instruments as objects invested with symbolic meaning beyond their musical significance. Music historians in turn having become increasingly familiar with the wealth of pictorial representations have sought equivalent information for their purposes: more precise information about the nature of ensembles playing methods and practices of performance in general in those many instances in which the answers could not be provided by surviving instruments. This book does not aspire to be a comprehensive or systematic treatment of its subject. Nor is it only an anthology – that is a conglomeration of essays chosen at random unrelated to each other. When a selection from my articles on musical instruments was suggested to me I was not sure that they would make a homogeneous group but after some reshuffling they seemed to fall into a natural order – reflecting what I suppose or at least hope has been an organic growth of thought. (MP)