About Erich von Hornbostel
Erich Moritz von Hornbostel was an Austrian ethnomusicologist, comparative musicologist, and scholar of music. He is remembered for his pioneering work in the field of ethnomusicology, and for the Sachs–Hornbostel system of musical instrument classification which he co-authored with Curt Sachs. He is also known as the father of the "Berlin School of Ethnomusicology" in conjunction with Carl Stumpf. Hornbostel specialized in African and Asian music, making many recordings and developing a system that facilitated the transcription of non-Western music from record to paper. He was Stumpf's assistant at the Berlin Psychological Institute, and when the archives of the Institute were used as the basis for the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, he became its first director in 1905. In the South Sea Islands, Hornbostel collected and analyzed recordings focusing on preservation which helped contribute greatly to the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv as a central repository for non-European music.
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