Musical Instruments Preservation Project

FAIN: PG-50793-10

Cincinnati Museum Association (Cincinnati, OH 45202-1557)
Matt Leininger (Project Director: May 2009 to September 2011)

Hiring a consultant to assess the museum's musical instrument collection and to recommend appropriate preservation treatment and storage. The musical instruments are used in research, education, and public programming to demonstrate the variety of musical traditions around the world.

Without a curator or expert of musical instruments on staff at the Cincinnati Art Museum, a large majority of the 800+ instruments in the collection have never been thoroughly researched and have remained in storage. Some individual instruments have been identified as being of rare and exceptional quality, including a Japanese Samisen labeled with the name of an Imperial lute master and an Italian Serpent Horn identified by scholar Herbert Heyde. However, most of the musical instrument collection has been stored in less than ideal conditions and, as a result, is inaccessible and suffering from deterioration. To address this situation, we plan to implement a three-phase Musical Instruments Preservation Project starting in January 2010: Phase 1 - Curatorial Assessment; Phase 2 - Conservation Assessment; Phase 3 - Re-housing.