Inventory work

Building up or completing a collection of which the aim is to mirror a cultural heritage and be used in research, there is an absolute need of surveying what already is stored in our museums and of at least knowing the most important privately owned items. It goes by itself that collecting can’t be done unplanned, but even if there is a collection plan, this must be completed by other methods of work. The above all most important thing is to do research in order to be able to state which place an instrument has in the general and domestic development of instrument construction, in the production of the respective workshops or factories and as an expression of stylistic fashion of the time both concerning music and furniture workmanship.

Therefore, keeping and always updating records and indices is an important task in many aspects. Some 35-40 years ago an inventory of the musical collections of larger museums and certain local museums in Sweden was done. Much has happened since that time. Museum collections have changed, and privately owned instruments have new owners. Nowadays we live in quite another world of technical possibilities of extracting facts of the instruments and compare them electronically. Add to this the importance of supplying international research on the field of musical instruments that is discovering what a rich land of keyboard instruments Sweden is. Therefore, it is necessary to follow up the work done earlier and make a new nation-wide inventory.

Such an inventory is a work in progress at the Klaverens Hus. It is an immense work that will take its time. As said above we have some knowledge of the collections of the larger city museums, but the great knowledge gap is found in the almost 2 000 local museums organized in 26 county and landscape associations. In addition there are valuable Swedish instruments in our Nordic neighbor countries, especially in Finland that from the High Middle Ages to 1809 formed the eastern part of our united countries.

Reports of the inventory work will successively be published on this site. Signed instruments will also be found in the ’number books’, i.e. production surveys that are reconstructed selling books from workshops and factories, which may be searched under the names given in the lists of makers (Knowledge bank, Swedish factories). The present whereabouts are with few exceptions given as ’public owner’ or ’private owner’ (for abbreviations see file in the Knowledge bank). We ‘dig where we are’ and start with our own region Hälsingland -Gästrikland – Dalarna.