Knowledge bank

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The title ’Knowledge bank’ indicates that a lot of files of varied content are collected on this site with the main theme of telling more about keyboard instruments in general and our own keyboard culture in particular.

Thus here are historical texts, for example a short history of keyboard instruments and a keyboard dictionary explaining tricky terms. Indices of Swedish workshops and factories are a result of decades of research and much work is still needed to complete them. Those who are interested in a certain builder or a special factory, click the name and you came to a document with several choices such as biography/history, production, models, signatures, drawings, pictures etc. Production overviews from what is preserved in Sweden are given for important foreign factories with significance of our own production.

To a large extent these surveys are results of inventorying collections of other organizations, mainly museums and the nearly 2 000 old homestead museums. Basic facts on instruments are given as lists that serve as production overviews in the same way we do with our own instruments. For all this work a documentation plan is needed, implying:

technical description of the instruments by measurements and pictures;
illumination of the manufacturing process, the life in the factories, fabric traditions, the growth of the tuners profession etc.;
studies of musical aspects such as traditions of style and interpretation;
research casting light upon social functions of the instruments;
ethical guidelines for taking care of the collections, restoration and copying selected instruments.

Here we also inform of ongoing research either it concerns the instruments themselves or the music that was played on them or in which contexts they have sounded. The parameters instrument-> construction/making ->music ->playing technique/playing qualities make a golden circle that, interacting and interplaying, illuminate the keyboard instruments from many aspects and enrich our knowledge and understanding of them.