Tibetan Music Instruments

Funded for three years (2019-21) by the PRO*Niedersachsen funding programme of the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture, the Tibetan musical instruments in the CWM's collections will be recorded and studied. The CWM houses a collection of Tibetan musical instruments that were used in ritual-religious and everyday contexts. As part of the Rolf Irle Collection, these objects, often ornately decorated and made of rare materials, have not been worked on until now and have largely remained hidden from the public. This project is dedicated to the indexing and presentation of Tibetan instruments with the help of musicological, museological, ethnological, philological and cultural-historical approaches and competences. The aim of the project is to document, catalogue and digitise the Tibetan musical instruments in the collection of the CWM at the University of Hildesheim in order to be able to integrate them both into university teaching and into current curatorial and museum education work at the CWM. In doing so, these instruments are to be supplemented with the sound carrier and literature holdings available in the collections and embedded in a larger cultural context by linking them to objects of material everyday culture. Through intensive cooperation with other collections and museums in Lower Saxony (e.g. the RPM and the Lower Saxony State Museum Hanover), the CWM pursues the utilisation of these Tibetan music collections both for science and for the general public (e.g. through exhibitions, guided tours and workshops with children and school classes) in the sense of an "applied ethnomusicology" - an ethnomusicology that is practically applied and has a direct impact on society.