Ethnography Museum (Neuchatel, Switzerland)

Bio

Based in Neuchatel, Switzerland, Ethnography Museum is a museum that features a collection of 1500 items instruments. The majority (900) comes from Africa, reflecting the general orientation of the heritage preserved in the institution.

All categories are represented, with a clear predominance of African idiophones: bells, rattles, bells, thumb piano and xylophones. The non-European instrument is the oldest chopi xylophone (type timbila), acquired by Cap General Charles Daniel de Meuron in the late eighteenth century.

Until the 1930s, musical instruments have not been the subject of systematic collection, except for a set of flutes Kabyle reported by Arnold Van Gennep in 1913. It was only the second Swiss scientist Mission in Angola (1932- 1933) conducted by Theodore Delachaux, that are made of genuine series reasoned, documented and game status, such as fifty lamellophones citanzi Cokwe forming the basis of the collection of sanza (cf. F. Borel, instruments Collection Music: Sanza The MEN:. 1986).

In 1954, Estreicher Zygmunt (1917-1993, ethnomusicologist then attached to the MEN) and André Schaeffner (from 1895 to 1980, his counterpart at the Museum of Man), MEN acquires Bardout collection, rich with 410 instruments from all sources, including French colonies in Africa and Asia. It includes a large number of stringed instruments including harps kundi thirty (Central Africa) which includes some rare specimens, such as the model against Nzakara below.

Musical instruments Sahelian countries (Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso) are well represented, thanks to the many research missions undertaken by Jean Gabus between 1947 and 1976. This research was continued by Ernst Lichtenhahn and François Borel up today.

Note mentioning is that the presence of a hundred European popular musical instruments, most of which date from the nineteenth. Among them, a metallic rattle from the time of Louis XIII, used by lepers.

The collection can be visited on request by the researchers. It is to be linked with the MEN's sound archives. It can also be accessed online via the museum’s database.

CHNeuchatel, Switzerland

Contact

+41327178560
Ethnography Museum
Profile added by Ano Shumba on 27 Oct 2015
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