Towards a History of European Folk Music Instruments

The examination of the rise, duration, and vanishing of the cultural achievements of peoples may be considered the main subject of our science. This includes also the examination of folk music instruments, in our case the instruments of Europe. And the final aim of all our endeavours is to penetrate their historical development. So extensive a problem cannot be solved by a single attempt. The path of research will be long and hard; it will be full of obstacles; it will not run straight but will make surprising turns through impassable fields. In most cases we have to go many ways to attain the end. And in my opinion it is necessary to check from time to time how far we have fulfilled our task, what remains to be done, and how it can be done. I think this is rather important for it has often happened that one has lost sight of the ultimate aim when dealing with details, and a historical treatment of the subject of our researches has not yet become a matter of course. And even today you can still find studies which give folk music instruments the appearance - whether consciously or not - of not being subject to constant change like all other products of civilization; studies which consider them as structures that cannot be influenced by time and environment and as structures which lead their own immutable lives - petrified by tradition. The methods for a diachronic investigation of folk melodies have been frequently and widely discussed. I am thinking especially of the conference on the scientific study of folk music which was held by the IFMC at Freiburg in 1956, and I remind you of the paper given there by W. WIORA On the Method of Comparative Melodic Research.1 The methodical problems, dealt with by Wiora, have not yet been extended to instruments, where the situation is a little different, though these problems do not lose their basic significance in this connection. For this reason