maeve tuesday july 11

Today I continued my archival research into Sarah Frishmuth and the ivory trumpets she donated to the museum. Though there were one or two cursory references to these trumpets made in some letters between her and Gordon, I'll still need to go through Gordon's side of the correspondence to clarify what was being asked. Frishmuth was the honorary Manager of the Department of Archaeology and Paleontology for a few years before being made the Honorary Curator of Musical Instruments because Culin and Wanamaker (a department store owner who took an interest in the Museum's early years) so appreciated her generous gift of a massive collection of instruments. In 1905, she wrote to the museum giving detailed directions for how she wanted her cases of instruments displayed, but she made no mention of the African materials. Frishmuth and everyone else who followed her seemed much more interested in the Asian and European instruments in the collection. An article about her I found in the archives theorized that the 1864 Great Fair of the U.S. Sanitary Commission in Philadelphia--organized to raise money for Union soldiers--may have inspired her "lifelong passion for the systematic accumulation of material objects." She initially collected "Chinese, Indian, and Egyptian Ethnological Objects, Mexican and Indian Pottery" (etc) before moving to musical instruments around 1892-3, probably at the Chicago Exposition. Frishmuth and her instruments were the subject of a well-known painting by Thomas Eakin titled "Antiquated Music (Portrait of Sarah Sagehorn Frishmuth)" which the Penn displayed among her collection for decades before it was given to the PMA by Eakins. None of the African musical instruments made the cut for the portrait.

I continued searching through the folders of the musical instruments collection to see if the African trumpets were ever mentioned, but the absent information was far more telling than what I actually found in the files. The collection was improperly catalogued it seems, and re-catalogued a few times, but the African instruments lists never include anything other than their catalogue numbers. For every other area, how the objects got into Frishmuth's hands was carefully documented, with some contextual information often included about each instrument. Turns out Frishmuth's relationship with the museum became strained because she kept giving her stuff to other museums, too, and the trumpet Dr. Zuberi picked which is listed as a gift from the PMA actually also came from Frishmuth. The PMA had a huge collection of her instruments that they ended up giving us in 1951. It's possible that this one was actually collected by Mrs. Drexel, as they both had large collections of musical instruments that seemed to be floating around Philadelphia at the same time with a lot of confusing overlap, but it seems more likely that it was Frishmuth's based on the notes I found.

The only other interesting find was some stuff about the ethnomusicology department's African dance and musical performances. Most of the focus in all of the writings about the collections was on the drums.