Episode 1: What was the first musical instrument?
In this opening episode of The Musical Archeologist, Craig Dabelstein explores a question raised by the Belgian musicologist Ernest Closson in L’Instrument de musique.
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Author: Craig Dabelstein
Craig Dabelstein is the founder of Maxime’s Music, a publisher dedicated to reviving the forgotten world of 19th-century music through recordings, editions, and translations. An instrumental music teacher and conductor, he spends his time unearthing lost repertoire, translating historic texts, and arguing—sometimes loudly—that music should move people before it impresses them.
Kastner: The Singing Flames
The Singing Flames tells the extraordinary story of Frédéric Kastner’s pyrophone, or fire organ.
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Olivier: The Spirit of Orpheus
In The Spirit of Orpheus, Gabriel d’Olivier asks one of the oldest and most searching questions in musical thought: what does music do to the human being?
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Chabanon: Observations on Music
What is music? Does it imitate nature, express the passions, speak a language, or act upon us in some more mysterious way?
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Weber: The musical situation and popular education in France
This first English translation makes available an important primary source for musicians, conductors, teachers, historians, and all readers interested in the history of music education, public music-making, and the place of music in society.
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Closson: The musical instrument as an ethnographic document
Ernest Closson was one of Belgium’s most distinguished musicologists, serving as a composer, critic, librarian, and scholar during a formative period in the development of modern musicology.
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Before Another Library Burns: how luck shapes music history
Every so often one encounters a story that reveals how terrifyingly fragile our musical inheritance really is.
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Festival and Competition of Bands, Paris 1867
Held during the Exposition Universelle in Paris 1867, the Festival was a performance of 1400 musicians under the dome of the Palace of Industry.
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The King Kong of Band Music
A monumental, 2-hour programmatic work for band portraying the entire life of Napoleon Bonaparte.
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The Retour des Cendres
The Retour des Cendres (“Return of the Ashes”) was the repatriation of the remains of Napoleon Bonaparte from the island of Saint Helena to Paris in 1840.
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