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During the summer of 1932, André Schaeffner submitted to Curt Sachs a new classification of musical instruments that he had already published in the first issue of the «Bulletin du Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro» in January 1931. The correspondence between the two scholars, preserved at the archives of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, shows that Sachs endorsed his system and that he sought to submit Schaeffner’s work to Hornbostel. Schaeffner’s proposal was then published in the «Revue Musicale» and later developed as Appendix to his seminal monograph Origine des instruments de musique (1936).This contribution presents the genetic and characteristics of André Schaeffner’s classification, evaluates its influence on French ethnomusicologists, its heritage and its impact in public collections (their storage and indexing systems), in academic training and in publications on organology., Durant l’été 1932, André Schaeffner soumit à Curt Sachs une nouvelle classification des instruments de musique qu’il venait de publier dans la première livraison du « Bulletin du Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro » en janvier 1931. La correspondance entre les deux chercheurs, conservée dans les archives du Musée de l’Homme à Paris, montre que Sachs apprécia le système et proposa de le soumettre à Hornbostel. La proposition de Schaeffner fut ensuite publiée dans la « Revue musicale » et plus tard développée comme Annexe dans son maître livre Origine des instruments de musique (1936).Cette contribution montre la genèse et les caractéristiques de la classification de Schaeffner, évalue son influence sur les ethnomusicologues français, son héritage et son impact dans les collections publiques (tant dans le classement des réserves que de leur système d’indexation), dans l’enseignement académique et dans les publications consacrées à l’organologie.

The ancient Greeks already used to give ethnic names (Doric, Phrygian, Lydian, etc.) to their different scales, and observations on differences in music of the various nations always raised the interest of musicians and philosophers. Yet, it was only in the late nineteenth century that “comparative musicology” (i.e. ethnomusicology) became an institutional science. An important role in this process was played by Carl Stumpf, a former pupil of Brentano’s who pioneered these researches in Berlin. Stumpf founded the Phonogrammarchiv (1900) to collect recordings of folk and extra-European music and a dedicated journal, the Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft. Gifted in the field of science no less than in that of musicology, Stumpf developed an empirically-oriented approach to phenomenology, deeply divergent from Husserl’s and highly influential over the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology. A self-declared “outsider” among armchair philosophers, Stumpf experimentally investigated the perception of sounds and the origins of musical consonance. Developing the physiological studies of Ernst Weber on the sense of touch, Stumpf discovered that two sensations of tone, given at the same time, tend to mix in a certain degree. Musical consonance – he claimed – lays in this level of “tonal fusion”, not in the allegedly “natural” series of the harmonic partials of a vibrating chord, as suggested by the naturalists of all times from Pythagoras to Stumpf’s great contemporary Hermann Helmholtz. Accordingly, no musical system can claim for preponderance over the others: Stumpf’s researches in comparative musicology served to corroborate his theses on “tonal fusion” and the psychological foundations of consonance. Although Stumpf later revised and finally abandoned this theory, its permanent value lays in its opposition to dominant naturalistic approaches. The commitment for comparative musicology at the Berlin School is then no concession to a positivistic fashion for exoticism. The fundamentally Eurocentric stance of naturalistic theories of music is also fiercely contrasted by Stumpf’s pupil Erich Hornbostel, who suggests that music ought to be considered as culture, rather than as nature, and focuses attention on the eventually melting human cultures. The Berlin school flourished until the Nazis forced most of its exponents to emigration and, for tragically obvious reasons, heavily discouraged researches on these topics.