Some musical ideas do not disappear because they were wrong. Sometimes they disappear because the books went out of print. Because the language changed. Because the instruments changed. Because the composers were forgotten. Because the music was placed in a box, on a shelf, in an archive — waiting for someone to open it again.
This is The Musical Archeologist: forgotten ideas from music’s past. I’m Craig Dabelstein — conductor, musician, and owner of Maxime’s Music. In this series, we’ll explore old writings on music: books on wind bands, military music, instruments, performances, emotions, education, and the strange, persistent human need to make organised sound meaningful.
We’ll also meet composers whose names have slipped out of musical memory — many of them discovered through the Endangered Music Archive, which houses the remarkable Benvenuti Music Library. Some episodes will begin with a nineteenth-century author. Some with a forgotten composer. Some with an old instrument, a curious musical argument, or a question conductors and performers are still asking today. And some episodes will simply be stories — strange, funny, touching, or surprising glimpses of musical life from the past.
This is not a museum tour. It is a search for ideas, sounds, people, and stories that still have a pulse.
So join me as we open the books, brush off the dust, lift the lid on the archive box, and listen for the music that history forgot to finish.
The Musical Archeologist: forgotten ideas from music’s past.
Music composed by Jeffrey A. Young.
Trailer
Ideas from Ernest Closson’s The Musical Instrument as an Ethnographic Document (1902)
Episode 1: What was the first musical instrument?
Episode 2: Why do bagpipes exist all over the world?
Episode 3: Can musical instruments reveal human migration?
Episode 4: The strange story of the bone flute
Episode 5: Why do so many cultures invent the same instrument?
Ideas from Adolphe Sax’s On the necessity of military bands (1867)
Episode 6: Are military bands useless?
Episode 7: The band is the voice of the flag
Episode 8: The day music hauled cannons over the Alps
Episode 9: The economics of brass
Episode 10: Destroy the cause and you destroy the effect
Ideas from Frederic Berr’s The need to reconstitute the School of Military Music (1838)
Episode 11: Why good bands need good systems
Episode 12: The problem with Gagistes
Episode 13: When the bandmaster has no authority
Episode 14: A dreadful hullaballoo
Episode 15: The school that was too small
Ideas from Oscar Comettant’s Francis Planté: Musical portrait with a pen (1874)
Episode 16: When a pianist was called a poet
Episode 17: The Interpreter as Servant of the Dead
Episode 18: The critic in raptures
Ideas from Hermann Eichborn’s On the History of Instrumental Music (1885)
Episode 19: The Trumpet Police
Episode 20: You may have music during the roast
Episode 21: Were medieval musicians really outcasts?
Episode 22: How the orchestra learned to be an orchestra
Episode 23: The Silicon Valley of instrumental music
Episode 24: The Instrument That Died Like an Old Crone Singing in Church
Episode 25: The Trombone Family Feud
Episode 26: Eichborn declares war on brass
Episode 27: When a city had its own soundtrack
Episode 28: Singer, Soldier, Constable, Fireworks Expert
Episode 29: The Orchestra of the Future, according to 1885