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The Catalog
This catalog site is designed so that it can be searched by keyword, collection, type of instrument, and date. It contains information on instruments in the possession of Duke University, with the exception of modern practice and performance pianos.
Modern Orchestral System
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The Collections
Eddy
De Hen-Bijl
Miller
DUMIC
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Replica Harpsichords and Fortepianos
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Contact Info
Dr. Brenda Neece, DPhil (Oxon.)
Curator, DUMIC
Box 90665
Durham, NC 27708-0665
USA
Tel: 919-660-3320
Fax: 919-660-3301
Are you an administrator?
Richard Ruggero
Owner and President of Ruggero Piano, Richard Ruggero has been servicing pianos in the triangle area for 32 years, including three years of training with founder and father, Robert Ruggero. He is a Registered Member of the Piano Technicians Guild (PTG), and has taught at every level of conference and convention from local to national. He is a three time conference director for the Southeast Regional Conference of the PTG and has served as Certified Tuning Examiner, Technical Examiner and member of the PTG Conference Board.
Richard and his wife Deborah have grown Ruggero Piano from a home based concern to one of the premier piano stores on the east coast offering top brands like Bosendorfer, FAZIOLI, Bluthner, Schimmel, Estonia, Mason & Hamlin and others. He and his staff also offer complete restoration of vintage pianos.
Richard still does some limited outside tuning a couple of days a week and concert service, but more than likely you will find him in the store tuning, regulating and voicing one of the many limited production pianos in the Ruggero inventory. He and son John tune and maintain most of the pianos in the store, and provide the highest level service after the sale. He is also active in the community and currently serves as Vice-Chair of the City of Raleigh Arts Commission.
Over the years, he has served or partnered with many arts based groups including the Raleigh Chamber Music Guild, Classical Voice of North Carolina, United Arts of Wake County, The Raleigh Symphony Orchestra, Community Music School of Raleigh, Trinity Music Academy, The Durham Symphony, Carolina Ballet, NC Theatre, Mallarme Chamber Players, Triangle Youth Philharmonic, Cary Cultural Arts Society, Music@NCState, and others.
Helping each customer find the perfect piano match and making a difference in the community by providing great pianos for events are his passions. His store, Ruggero Piano, is located in Raleigh at 4720-120 Hargrove Rd. 27616. www.ruggeropiano.com.
Historical Interactions between Rooms and Music
December 19, 2010
4 PM
Rare Book Room
Perkins Library, Duke University West Campus
Click here for parking information.
Examples of how the science of acoustics can help us explore influences between architecture and music: (1) how Duke Chapel illustrates the relationships between liturgical chant and early organ works and the kinds of rooms in which they arose, (2) how recent studies of Renaissance Venetian churches contribute to our understanding of the development of choral polyphony, and (3) how computer modeling can be used to recreate the sound of music in a long-lost room – Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s concert hall within her parents’ Berlin mansion.
Dewey Lawson
Dewey Lawson (A.B. Harvard, Ph.D. Duke) is an Adjunct Professor of Physics at Duke. He currently teaches a course on Acoustics and Music and a seminar on the many ways in which sound has connected people across differences in culture, geography, and time.
Mamadou Diabate Wins Grammy Award!
Mamadou Diabate, internationally known kora artist and Durham resident received a well-deserved Best Traditional World Music Album Grammy Award for his album Douga Mansa. The News & Observer ran an interesting piece HERE. See photos from the Grammy Awards HERE and HERE.
DUMIC was the first division of Duke to invite Mr. Diabate to perform, back in 2005, for the inauguration of the Frans & Willemina de Hen-Bijl Collection. In 2007, DUMIC and the Duke University Libraries were fortunate to have Mr. Diabate give a program in the Rare Music series called A Griot and his Kora. Diabate’s Rare Music program celebrated the addition of a kora made by his father to DUMIC. Mr. Diabate brought this kora back from Mali himself.
Congratulations to Mamadou Diabate from DUMIC!
Frans and Willemina De Hen-Bijl Collection
Duke’s Frans & Willemina de Hen-Bijl Collection includes over 200 instruments, 100 reel-to-reel field recordings, and over 1000 slides of musical instruments from all over the world that were collected by prominent Belgian organologist and ethnomusicologist Professor Ferdinand J. de Hen whose main interests are the history and structure of classical European, Indian, and African musical instruments.
Named for his parents, the collection was acquired during his research expeditions. His collecting journeys were often quite exciting. He traveled through much of Afghanistan on horseback collecting instruments. While there he also followed a Khutchi tribe on foot for days without making contact; as de Hen recalled, “They have to invite you otherwise they may shoot you . . . I finally was invited.” Once on his travels he ate bread with currants that turned out to be flies. He also had some interesting adventures in Macedonia: one night he slept in a flea-infested bed on his travels there and one day he was shown around by the mayor of Berovo who was wearing his newest acquisition – a pair of pyjamas. De Hen remembers that in Morocco he was cured by a medicine man: “I was ‘cured’ from fever by members of the Ait bu Guemmez tribe . . . beating the whole night on their drums – a dead man would have got out because of the noise!” In Irian Jaya (New Guinea) he narrowly escaped being kidnapped by the Dani tribe. He ended up spending some time among them and was amused by the fact that the men were completely naked except for calabashes; apparently they took pride in bragging about and comparing calabash sizes. He was adopted twice: once by an old Berber woman in the Ahansali tribe (Morocco) and another time by Princess Thopi in her clan in Swaziland. Even at home he was reminded of his travels: he “had a wonderful butterfly come out in Belgium from an instrument brought back from Swaziland.”
De Hen received his training in Antwerp, Louvain, Cologne, and London. He has degrees in Colonial and Administrative Sciences and Political and Administrative Sciences from the Institute Universitaire des Territoires d’Outremer, Antwerp. He also has a degree in African Linguistics from the University of Louven, and a doctorate in musicology and anthropology from Cologne University, with a dissertation on African instruments. While doing his doctorate he did a research course on African and Indian Music at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University. Now mostly retired, de Hen has worked as a scientific collaborator and research assistant at the Museum of Instruments in Brussels, as the Director of the Artistic Humanities (Brussels), as Professor of the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth (Waterloo), and Professor & Head of Department in Musicology at the State University (Ghent), as Professor of the Hoger Instituut voor Dramatische Kunst (Antwerp), and a guest Professor at the University of Keele (UK). In 1987 he was appointed to the Peter Paul Rubens chair at the University of California, Berkeley, he became an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences (Brussels) in 1989, and a member of the Academie europeenne des Sciences et des Arts (Paris) in 2003. He has also given lectures at Osaka, Kyoto, Cologne, Belfast, Denver, Brussels, Antwerp, and The Hague. He has published seven books and some 250 articles, including a book with Roger Bragard on the history of instruments that has been translated into several languages.
R. Larry Todd
R. Larry Todd
R. Larry Todd is Arts and Sciences Professor of Music at Duke University, where he has taught for 30 years. He received his Ph.D. in Musicology from Yale University. Prof. Todd is the author of Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (Oxford: 2003), widely hailed as the definitive biography of Felix Mendelssohn and now translated into German (Carus-Verlag/Reclam: 2008). His newest book, Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn, was published by Oxford University Press in 2009. In especially high demand for Mendelssohn events this year, Todd is traveling the world from California and New York to Leipzig and London, giving lectures, pre-concert talks, and interviews, and filming documentaries. In addition to his work on the Mendelssohns, Todd is respected for his work as an author, editor, and lecturer on topics ranging from Obrecht to Webern.
Recorder Information
For the purposes of the New Music for Old Instruments project, baroque recorders will be discussed, although DUMIC has both baroque and renaissance types.
An excellent source for information on ranges and notation of recorder parts is the Dolmetsch Online site.
In addition, there is a guide by Ann Bies, which she wrote for a composer friend in 2003.
As English and American terminology is different, here is a list with both and the key of each:
Soprano/Descant: C
Alto/Treble: F
Tenor: C
Bass/Bass in F: F
Consult the above links for further information.
Crumhorn Information
Crumhorns are hook-shaped, wind-cap woodwind instruments with double reeds that were originally in use for a very limited period (c1480-1650). However, these are some of the most common instruments of the early music revival, made in the 1950s by makers such as Otto Steinkopf and Hermann Moeck.
DUMIC contains several SATB families of crumhorns, some from the Collegium Collection, some from the Miller, and some from the Warner.
Modern crumhorns have a slightly larger compass than original examples through the addition of keys. Although there are some variations, here are basic ranges for each size of our modern examples:
S: c’-f’’
A: f-b-flat’
T: c-f’
B: F-b-flat
Here is an interesting example of a modern improvisation on the alto crumhorn from this page, which has lots of useful information.
Rebec Information
Rebecs are one of the ancestors of the violin, commonly with three strings tuned in fifths. It is pear-shaped with a rounded back. The rebecs in DUMIC are from the Warner Collection and most were made by Warner himself and do not have a rounded back. Warner made an entire family of rebecs consisting of SATB members. Possible tunings for each are as follows:
S: d’-a’-e’’
A: g-d’-a’
T: c-g-d’
B: A-c-g
Many variants can be used, and a combination of a 4th and a 5th (in either configuration) can be used instead of two 5ths. Given the above tunings, the range for each instrument could safely extend another couple of whole steps without shifting, giving one the comfortable upper end of the compass.
Many thanks to John Pringle for all of his help and tuning information, and many thanks to the folks at High Strung for their sponsorship of this project in their work on the instruments and bows.
Robert D. Miller Collection
Duke alumnus Dr. Robert D. Miller (1941-2006) bequeathed his collection of replicas of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque musical instruments to the Duke University Musical Instrument Collections. The Miller Collection arrived on campus late in 2006, and many of the instruments have been on display in the upper lobby of the Mary Duke Biddle Music Building from January 2007.
The Miller Collection includes over 30 musical instruments, related sheet music, wooden music stands, and display mounts for his instruments. Most of the instruments are in playing condition.
A native North Carolinian, Dr. Miller was educated in the Chapel Hill public elementary and high schools, graduating as valedictorian of his class at Chapel Hill High School in June of 1959. He attended Davidson College from 1959 to 1960 and then studied at the University of London and the University of Vienna before returning to Davidson in 1961. He graduated cum laude from Davidson College in June 1964. He earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry here at Duke in 1972 for his dissertation, “A Study of the Changes in Histones During Evolution and Development” and his M.D. in 1973 from the Duke Medical School. He was also a resident in Psychiatry at Duke from 1973 through 1976. Throughout his career he published extensively and taught Forensic Psychiatry in the contexts of both Health Sciences and Law programs. Before his death not only was he a Professor of Psychiatry, but he also served as Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Denver College of Law and as the Director of the Forensic Fellowship Program at the University of Colorado.