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Musical Instruments.

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Origins and Development of Musical Instruments. By Jeremy Montagu. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007. [xvi, 257 p. ISPN-13: 9780810856578. $75.] Illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, index.

Jeremy Montagu's Origins and Development of Musical Instruments is a welcome addition to the field of organology. Montagu, the former curator of the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments and lecturer in the faculty of music at Oxford, is the author of numerous works, including a book on timpani and percussion (Tympani and Percussion [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002]), and another on reeds (Reed Instruments: The Montague Collection: An Annotated Catalogue [Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001]). In this latest of his books, the author focuses not only on the origins and history of instruments from many cultures and time periods, but also on technology and classification. An abundant number of black and white figures--120 photos--many from the author's own collection of over 2,500 instruments, appear within the 257 double column pages. The images, in keeping with his desire "to give priority to the lesser known," (p. xiii) favor the exotic and less familiar. Perhaps one of his inspirations was Filippo Bonanni's Gabinetto armonico (1723), "The first book on musical instruments to show as much interest in the instruments of the common people and the exotic, as those of the art music of the upper classes" (p. 26). For students, his inclusion of descriptions and images of some rarely seen instruments...

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