The Look of Music: Rare Musical Instruments, 1500-1900

by Philip T. Young

Vancouver Museums & Planetarium Association, 1980. Catalog of exhibition entitled The Look of Music at the Vancouver Centennial Museum in 1980. Soft cover, 240 pp. 8.25 X 11". Illustrations, chiefly black and white with 16 pages of color reproductions. Contents include: Introduction by Phillip T. Young; Prologue; Acknowledgements; The Renaissance 1450-1600; The Baroque 1600-1750; The Classical 1750-1825; The Romantic 1825-1900; Bibliography. [Excerpt from Introduction] Although there are many fine museum collections of historical musical instruments, there has never before been a public exhibition of this magnitude. Until recently there has been little general interest in early instruments, and even with the tremendous current growth of awareness, a few museums are unable to devote precious exhibition space even to the display of their own collections...The exhibition is "wind heavy" only because museums are more willing to loan winds than the more fragile strings and keyboards. We also decided to limit this exhibition to western European instruments made between 1500 and 1900 and to exclude, for the most part, purely folk and amateur types. We further decided that the well-established organological and socio-cultural importance of the musical instruments used by the first British Columbians deserves independent and definitive treatment in a separate exhibition. The labels "Classical", "Romantic", and so forth, are intended simply as a guide based on familiar signposts. In a few cases where these categories conflict with the instrument's actual date of manufacture, our intention was to indicate the historical period in which most specimens of the same type would normally be found.

240 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1980