The look of music: Rare musical instruments, 1500-1900

Distributed in the U.S. by the University of Washington Press, 1980-01-01. Paperback. Good. 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; Teh Baroque 1600-1750; The Classical 1750-1825; The Romantic 1825-1900; Bibliography. In good condition. Glossy black pictorial paper covers have bumping and creasing to edges and corners with a bit of chipping and peeling to the color at the corner tips. Binding tight. Pages lightly aged and have some rippling on the bottom corners from moisture exposure, but otherwise are clean and unmarked. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. [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 littie 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. Examples are Nos. 18 and 109. Finally this publication is intended primarily to answer basic questions and to arouse the interest of musicians and the general public- However, I hope there will be useful things in it for the scholar as well.