The Hornbostel Demonstration Collection is the first publication that provides traditional music collected worldwide as sound examples for listening. The holdings of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, founded in 1900, enabled the presentation of sound examples from nearly all music cultures, which were recorded on wax cylinders for the Archive in different areas of the world (Hornbostel, 1933). Erich M. von Hornbostel (1877–1935), director of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, produced the Demonstration Collection as an overview of the vocal and instrumental musics of the whole world.
Out of about 10,000 wax cylinders, collected between 1900 and 1913, 120 cylinders were chosen by Hornbostel to represent the wealth of the world’s musical cultures. The introduction to the collection clearly explains its purpose: o ‘make the treasures of the collection available to all researchers interested in ethnology, the … history of music, aesthetics, ethno- psychology in general, and also to a wide lay public’ (Simon, ...
