greetings

[Jeremy Montagu <jmontagu@vax.ox.ac.uk>]

I am the curator of the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments, which is
housed in the Faculty of Music of the University of Oxford.  The
collection is basically one of European art-music instruments, mainly of
wind instruments and with more woodwind than brass - we are the most
comprehensive collection in Britain of such woodwind and our brass, I
think, is only exceeded by that of the Edinburgh collection.  We also have
some early keyboards, more than anyone else in Oxford and we are probably
somewhere around the number 5 or 6 museum collection of such things in the
country. 

As well as that, I have a personal collection of something over 2,300
instruments, all types, world wide, rather more ethno than euro, certainly
over the last dozen years to avoid conflict of interest. 

I am not a conservator.  I have for years been interested in conservation
(much under Cary's influence initially) because I am responsible for it in
both collections - it's necessary to know what it's about so as to
organise it.  Simple jobs I do myself; more complex ones I want to know
what should be done and who should do it.  There are many problems in my
own collection - what can be done to conserve ivory, bamboo and otehr
grasses, all sorts of animal, fish, and reptile skins, gut and vegetable
strings, and so on. 

I have tried to persuade knowledgeable persons to publish in the more
accessible periodicals (FoMRHI, GSJ, etc) because however unscholarly such
publications may be considered, I believe that it is important to inform
private collectors such as myself about conservation - the private
collections of today are the museum collections of tomorrow, and it would
be nice if the museums got them before ignorant people have screwed them
up.  Very certainly the museums of today were the private collections of
yesterday, and when I look round the Bate Collection, with all due
deference to my elders and betters, I do indeed see much that has been
screwed up, a good deal of it beyond any reasonable redemption. 

So I welcome MICAT-L and I hope that access to it, to readers at least,
will be fairly wide and welcoming. 

Meanwhile, my own work, if you're interested, consists of running the
Bate, teaching, and dealing with correspondence.  I am secretary of
FoMRHI, of the Musical Collections Forum, and president of the European
Seminar in Ethnomusicology.  Particular interests include classification
of instruments, mediaeval and later (and earlier) iconography of
instruments, and diffusion, development, history, and use of instruments
worldwide in general. 

Access to the Bate Collection is Monday to Friday, 2.00-5.00 pm, and other
times by appointment; access to my own collection and library is any other
times than those which may be mutually convenient, again by appointment. 
A complete Checklist of the Bate Collection is available in print; it and
a 'catalogue in progress' of my own collection are available on two HD
disks (just send 2 blank disks if you want copies), but only in
WordPerfect format.  I've not the time to convert them to ASCII with all
the elimination of accents and diacriticals that that would imply, and
besides my own catalogue is in many separate files in Hornbostel/Sachs
sequence, which would take a lot of time to string together, and that
would then inhibit constant up-dating. Jeremy Montagu