Classics of Musical Literature: Nicholas Bessaraboff's Ancient European Musical Instruments

Abstract

On the day after Pearl Harbor not many persons were thinking about old instruments. Nevertheless, this date-Dec. 8, 1941-must be regarded in retrospect as a red-letter day in the history of old instruments, for it was then that Harvard University Press published Nicholas Bessaraboff's Ancient European Musical Instruments, An Organological of the Musical Instruments in the Leslie Lindsey Mason Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Begun as a short catalog of the Galpin (Leslie Lindsey Mason) Collection in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Bessaraboff's project grew and grew until it became a general compendium of Western European instruments-or, as Bessaraboff regarded it himself, as a primer of instruments which set out go to the bottom of things. It was not really a history of instruments since the Study was not arranged chronologically or as a continuous narrative but systematically in the form of a catalog, with general commentaries on families of instruments and specific information about the particular instruments in the collection. Originally brought together by Canon Francis W. Galpin in England, the collection was purchased and presented to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1916 by William Lindsey of Boston as a memorial to his daughter, Mrs. Leslie Lindsey Mason, who perished in the sinking of the Lusitania. The whole collection comprises five hundred and sixty four instruments, both European and extra-European, the former numbering three hundred and seventeen items. The collection's importance stems not from individual instruments of great commercial valuethere are no Stradivari violins, for instance-but from its comprehensive representation of the families and types of musical instruments (all before 1850) and occasionally from individual instruments of exceptional historical interest, such as the two-keyed flute (no. 43) that belonged