Publicaciones

The Danish musicologist Hortense Panum (1856–1933) published Middelalderens strengeinstrumenter og deres forløbere i oldtiden in three volumes over a period of 16 years (1915, 1928, 1931). The long publication process allowed Panum to consider newly published literature on the subject, which gave her an opportunity to enter into dialogue with colleagues who held different opinions, among them Curt Sachs and Francis Galpin. Indeed, Panum refused to accept the widely held assumption that instruments had arisen independently in two distinct times and places, and in a Darwinian approach she decided to find the missing links between the two seemingly unrelated parts of string instruments’ history. As few instruments or fragments of instruments had been preserved, her research relied on iconographic and literary sources. Panum’s opus contains an impressive number of over 400 images that depict stringed instruments of antiquity and the Middle Ages, many of them less familiar to the music researcher. The section on specific Nordic instruments is a particularly pioneering work. Jeffrey Pulver (1884–1984), author of the valuable Biographical dictionary of Old English music (1927), recognizing Middelalderens strengeinstrumenter as a standard reference work, created the one-volume English translation.