Erich M. Von Hornbostel

Erich M. von Hornbostel (February 25, 1877, Vienna, Austria — November 28, 1935, Cambridge, UK) was an Austrian ethnomusicologist and sound recording pioneer. Hornbostel studied the piano, harmony and counterpoint as a child; later physics and philosophy in Vienna and Heidelberg, but his PhD at the University of Vienna was in chemistry. He moved to Berlin, where he fell under the influence of Carl Stumpf and worked with him on musical psychology and psychoacoustics. He was Stumpf's assistant at Berliner Psychologischen Institut (Berlin Psychological Institute), and when the Institute's archives became the basis for the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, Hornbostel became its first director in 1905. Hornbostel did notable work in the field of ethnomusicology, then usually referred to as "comparative musicology." He was a highly regarded teacher, with some of his students including American composer Henry Cowell and Polish-Canadian ethnomusicologist Mieczyslaw Kolinski. Hornbostel specialized in African and Asian music, making many recordings and developing a system that facilitated the transcription of non-Western music from recordings to paper. He saw the musical tunings used by various cultural groups as an essential element in determining the character of their music and did a lot of work in comparing different tunings. Among other notable Hornbostel's contributions was the "Sachs–Hornbostel system" of musical instrument classification which he co-authored with Curt Sachs, first published in 1914.