Maryaguirre

Sources and Methodology

How claims are gathered, weighed and cited — and how to read the footnotes at the end of every entry.

Where the information comes from

Entries are built from sources that can be checked: museum collection records and galleries, university collections of historic instruments, conservatory and orchestra education pages, national libraries and archives, and established reference works. Every entry lists four to seven of these at the bottom of the page, with the name of the institution, the title of the page consulted and a link. Commercial pages, forums and social media are not used as evidence.

How a claim earns its place

  • Documented facts — dates, patents, measurements and named makers that appear in institutional records — are stated directly.
  • Scholarly consensus is introduced with wording such as “historians generally agree”.
  • Contested or uncertain points — disputed inventors, legendary attributions, origins that predate writing — are labelled as such, and the evidence is described rather than a single tidy answer being chosen.
  • Typical values for range, tuning, size and materials are given with “typically” or “commonly”, because makers and traditions differ.

Respect for living traditions

Many instruments in the library belong to traditions that are practised today. Those traditions are described in the present tense where that is accurate, names and terms are given in their own languages where helpful, and entries avoid reducing a culture to a single stereotype. Geographic and cultural references appear where they are needed to explain an instrument’s origin and context.

What is not reproduced

Entries are written in original language. Sources are summarised and cited, not copied, and quotation is kept to a few words at most. Photographs are used only when their licence allows it; the origin, author and licence of each one are recorded on the Image Credits page. The library publishes no audio recordings at present.

Dates and revisions

Each entry shows the date it was first published and the date it was last reviewed. When a reader reports a mistake, or a better source comes to light, the entry is revised and the review date changes. See the Corrections Policy.

How the library classifies instruments

Entries are grouped into six families — keyboard, strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion and free-reed — that reflect how musicians commonly talk about instruments. The catalogue also lets you filter by the physical way sound begins (vibrating string, air column, membrane, solid body or free reed), by playing method, approximate range, musical context and the era in which the recognisable form emerged. The article Instrument Families and How They Are Classified explains the thinking behind these groupings and how they relate to the scholarly Hornbostel–Sachs system.

Institutions cited in the library

The following institutions and reference works are cited in at least one entry or article. Counts show the number of pages that cite them.

  • Philharmonia Orchestra (20)
  • Horniman Museum and Gardens (12)
  • Grinnell College Libraries (10)
  • University of Edinburgh, St Cecilia’s Hall (8)
  • Victoria and Albert Museum (7)
  • Grinnell College Musical Instrument Collection (5)
  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art (5)
  • Dallas Symphony Orchestra (4)
  • Musical Instrument Museum (MIM), Phoenix (4)
  • University of Edinburgh (St Cecilia’s Hall collections) (4)
  • St Cecilia’s Hall, University of Edinburgh (3)
  • The Bate Collection, University of Oxford (3)
  • BBC Music Magazine (2)
  • Canadian Conservation Institute (2)
  • Early Music America (2)
  • Google Arts & Culture (Museo del Violino, Cremona) (2)
  • Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) (2)
  • UNSW Sydney, School of Physics (Music Acoustics) (2)
  • Yale School of Music (2)
  • Art Fund / Horniman Museum and Gardens (1)
  • Berklee College of Music (1)
  • Berklee Online (1)
  • City of Wiesbaden (Stadtlexikon) (1)
  • Deutsche Biographie (1)
  • Duke University (1)
  • Duke University Musical Instrument Collection (1)
  • Google Arts & Culture (1)
  • Google Arts & Culture (Technisches Museum Wien) (1)
  • Google Arts & Culture (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) (1)
  • Google Arts & Culture (Unioncamere) (1)
  • Historisches Museum Basel (1)
  • ʻUkulele Hall of Fame (1)
  • International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) (1)
  • Iowa State University (1)
  • King Baudouin Foundation (1)
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1)
  • Museum of Making Music (1)
  • Museum Wales (1)
  • Musical Instrument Museum (Phoenix) (1)
  • Musical Instrument Museums Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh (1)
  • Musical Instruments Museum, Brussels (1)
  • Northern Illinois University (1)
  • Penn Museum (1)
  • Percussive Arts Society (1)
  • Rijksmuseum (1)
  • Rijksmuseum / National Music Museum (1)
  • Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (1)
  • Rosenberg Library Museum (1)
  • Senzoku Gakuen College of Music (1)
  • Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (1)
  • Sound and Science: A Database for Sources in the History of Acoustics (1)
  • Spurlock Museum, University of Illinois (1)
  • St. Olaf College (1)
  • Temple University (1)
  • U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (1)
  • University of Edinburgh (1)
  • University of Hawaiʻi (1)
  • Yale Collection of Musical Instruments (1)

Suggest a better source

If you know of a museum record, scholarly article or archive that would strengthen an entry, please send it to us or use the contact page.