Musical Instrument Collection

The University of Göttingen’s collection of musical instruments traces its origins to an initiative by Heinrich Husmann: through his collaboration with Günther Spannaus (Ethnology) and a joint seminar held during the Winter Semester of 1962/63 (“Problems in Ethnomusicology: A Musicological and Ethnological Perspective”), a core collection was established in 1964 through the loan and subsequent purchase of the private collection of Hermann Johannes Moeck (Celle). From the outset, the musical instrument collection was closely intertwined with the Ethnological Collection and its systems of object classification and knowledge management. Although, as a comparatively young university collection, it was not founded during the early phase of colonial acquisitions, its system of knowledge is directly linked to the colonial modernity of university collecting, particularly where terminologies, classifications and geographical attributions reproduce colonial hierarchies. ‘Music and race’ constituted the underlying rationale for collecting and classifying. This coloniality of knowledge continues to shape the infrastructure of the collection. Formulations such as ‘musical instruments from all over the world and throughout history’ reinforce hegemonic universalism: European art music around 1900 serves as the benchmark, whilst ‘non-European’ objects are framed as ‘exotic’, ‘primitive’ or ‘primordial’. The Göttingen Musical Instrument Collection is thus also an exemplary site of epistemic violence, one that not only invites but also demands scholarly self-reflection.

Cultural Musicology (Chair: Professor Birgit Abels) and Digital and Material Musicology (Junior Professor Dr Ryoto Akiyama) address this issue through decolonial approaches and reflection on the history of scholarship. In teaching and student supervision, engagement with colonial patterns of thought is structurally embedded. In the Musical Instrument Collection, this is evident in the seminar “Fundamentals of Organology” (since the winter semester 2023/24): students examine acquisition contexts and the histories of the objects, and reflect on the conditions under which their knowledge is produced.

Another key focus is the “Open Collection” via digital platforms in accordance with the FAIR and CARE principles. Data curation is understood as a decolonial touchstone, because standardized data, vocabularies, algorithmic processing and AI tools can stabilize and reinforce colonial knowledge structures. The module “Digital and Material Musicology” (from the Summer Semester 2025) makes this a subject of study. The focus is not merely on coming to terms with “one” particular past of North Atlantic academia, but on the continuities of global colonial modernity right up to the present day. Accordingly, questions of ownership and belonging are approached with due sensitivity, mindful of the contemporary geopolitical and cultural-political conflicts in which they are situated.

The ongoing review of the Moeck holdings reflects the fact that cultural objects acquired unlawfully continued to circulate through commercial networks even after the Second World War. More pressing, however, is the critical reappraisal of entrenched patterns of thought within musicology. A comprehensive transformation of collection practices is now imminent.