Collection of Musical Instruments at the University of Göttingen
Musical Instrument Collection of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Sounds from around the world – and the questions they raise
The Musical Instrument Collection at the University of Göttingen is one of the largest university collections of its kind in Germany. Over a thousand instruments from Europe, Asia, and Africa – including artefacts of ancient Egyptian musical practice – invite visitors to discover a remarkable diversity of sound-making traditions. Yet the collection is more than a repository of objects: it is a site of ongoing research where we ask whose knowledge shaped the way these instruments were collected, classified, and interpreted – and whose perspectives were left out.
A place with a history of German musicology
Göttingen's engagement with musical instruments as objects of scholarly inquiry reaches back to the early 1930s. Hermann Zenck (1898–1950), who had studied under Theodor Kroyer (1873–1945) in Leipzig, was appointed to Göttingen in 1932 and set out to build an instrument collection as essential infrastructure for musicological research – on a par with the library and its monument editions and complete works. A first collection was assembled through a loan from the Hanover-based firm Piano Helmholz, but was dissolved in 1941 due to organisational difficulties. The present collection was established in 1964 when the musicologist Heinrich Husmann (1908–1983) initiated the purchase of the private collection of Hermann Johannes Moeck, an instrument manufacturer and music publisher based in Celle, comprising around 1,000 objects. The acquisition grew out of a joint seminar with the ethnologist Günther Spannaus – "Problems of Music Ethnology, from Musicological and Ethnological Perspectives" (winter semester 1962/63) – and the collection was, from the outset, closely intertwined with the university's Ethnological Collection.
In the shadow of this institutional consolidation stood the embattled life of Hans Hickmann (1908–1968). A close associate of Curt Sachs since his student years, Hickmann was an outspoken opponent of the German-nationalist current within musicology. In 1935 he emigrated to Cairo together with his wife Brigitte Schiffer, a Jewish composer and musicologist; even there, he remained exposed to the pressures of the National Socialist regime. During his years in Egypt, Hickmann catalogued the musical instruments held at the Egyptian Museum and laid the foundations on which music archaeology continues to build today. It was in this context that he also assembled his own collection of ancient Egyptian objects, which he sold to Hermann Johannes Moeck after returning to Germany in the 1950s – amid the political transformations brought about by the rise of Pan-Arabism. On that occasion, Hickmann also catalogued the entire Moeck holdings on index cards, which to this day form the musicological foundation of the Göttingen collection. Whether the later transfer of the collection to Göttingen was a gratifying development for Hickmann cannot be discerned from his own words.
A first permanent exhibition was installed between 1976 and 1984 in the historic Accouchierhaus on Kurze Geismarstraße. After the building's four-year restoration, a newly conceived exhibition opened on the second floor in 1989 and remains in place today. Today's basis for critical discussion owes much to the ethnomusicological research, curatorial work, and collection catalogue of the former curator Klaus-Peter Brenner, who managed the collection from 1992 to 2022. When the Department of Musicology relocated to the Centre for Cultural Studies in 2021, the instrument collection stayed behind in the Accouchierhaus – a place with its own atmosphere and its own history.
A collection in transition – reflecting on coloniality
Although the collection was not founded during the early phase of colonial acquisitions, the categories through which it was organised – its terminologies, taxonomies, and geographical attributions – remain entangled with the colonial modernity of university collecting. Formulae such as "musical instruments from all over the world and all periods" project a seemingly neutral universalism in which European art music serves as the implicit standard, while objects from other traditions are framed as "exotic," "primitive," or "primordial." These knowledge orders persist in the collection's infrastructure and demand sustained scholarly self-reflection.
Cultural Musicology (Prof. Dr. Birgit Abels) and Digital and Material Musicology (Jun.-Prof. Dr. Ryoto Akiyama) take up this challenge. In the seminar Fundamentals of Organology (since winter semester 2023/24), students trace acquisition contexts and object biographies and critically examine how musicological knowledge is produced. The ongoing review of the Moeck holdings also reckons with the likelihood that cultural property unlawfully acquired circulated through post-war trade networks. A thorough transformation of collection practice is underway.
Open Collection – thinking FAIRly, acting responsibly
A central goal is to make the collection accessible through digital platforms, guided by the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and the CARE principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics). Digital openness alone, however, does not guarantee equitable representation: authority files, controlled vocabularies, and algorithmic tools can perpetuate colonial knowledge orders when adopted uncritically. The advanced module "Digital and Material Musicology" (from summer semester 2025) therefore treats data curation as a decolonial touchstone – a subject of both scholarly inquiry and pedagogical practice.
Questions of ownership and cultural belonging are addressed with care, in full awareness of their present-day geopolitical dimensions. The task is not simply to reckon with a past chapter of academic history, but to confront the continuities of colonial modernity that reach into the present.
Staff
Head: Jun.-Prof. Dr. Ryoto AkiyamaStudent assistant (curatorial work): Emily Marohn
Contact & Visits
Musical Instrument Collection of Georg-August-Universität GöttingenAccouchierhaus · Kurze Geismarstraße 1 · 37073 Göttingen
Tel.: +49 (0)551 39-24930 ·
Email: musikinstrumentensammlung@uni-goettingen.de
For viewing appointments and guided tours, please contact the Department of Musicology.