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Music Listening


Music Listening
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Musical Instruments



Tollefsen - some 65 instruments, European and Oriental, mainly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as follows:

  • Lute family (including lute, mandola, chitaeroney, theorbo) - 12.
  • Also two presentation lutes, one belonging to Catherine the Great of Russia.
  • Three specimens of the lyre family.
  • Wind instruments (including oboe, piccolo, recorders, one eighteenth-century German flute and a French clarinet of 1820) - 15.
  • Two violas d' amore, one dated 1792.
  • One violin
  • One harpsichord (Pisa 1756)
  • One Italian bagpipe
  • Two presentation batons
  • Fourteen bows of various kinds
  • Nine Oriental instruments, including sitar, vina, Persian long lute, braiva, Siam spike fiddle, koto and Chinese drum.
African - a group of twenty-five ethnic instruments mainly from Sierra Leone, purchased in 1970 for the library by Miss Margaret Sherwin and her sister Cathy. This collection includes an assortment of gourd rattles, drums, metal rings and beaters, a feulah guitar, buli horn, flute, and a fine balangi (xylophone). Also present is a koro from Mali, with directions for tuning, extra strings, picture of the artist and singer, and a tape of music and commentary.

If you have questions or comments, about this collection, please contact Therese Dickman, Fine Arts Librarian, Lovejoy Library, at tdickma@siue.edu or call 618-650-2695.

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