New in the Musikinstrumenten-Museum: Instrument expert Christian Breternitz

News from 07/07/2020

Organs, wind instruments and iPads: Christian Breternitz's apprenticeship and years of travel in the fascinating and diverse world of musical instruments. The instrument expert is the new research associate at the Musikinstrumenten-Museum of the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung.

Christian Breternitz next to a showcase with wind instruments
© SIMPK / Katrin Herzog

By Julia Spinola

It was a mighty, magical instrument, the organ, that enticed Christian Breternitz to study a niche subject within musicology: instrument science. He began learning the piano and organ during childhood, in a small community in Thuringia. At the age of thirteen, he took on duties as a volunteer organist for his home parish. And while studying musicology, psychology and educational science in Weimar and Jena, he took part in seminars on organ building given by Franz Körndle (now teaching in Augsburg), who shared his passion for the organ and who fueled his interest in the secrets of these instruments. Breternitz wrote his master’s thesis about an important Thuringian organ building company by the name of Schulze, which was a global leader during the nineteenth century. After completing his studies, he saw a job ad from the Musikinstrumenten-Museum (Museum of Musical Instruments) in Berlin, which launched his career in the museum sector. Beginning in 2012, Breternitz worked here for two years as a research assistant, where together with Conny Restle, he curated a temporary exhibition, Valve.Brass.Music. 200 years of Valved Brass Instruments, to mark the bicentenary of the invention of the valve for brass instruments. He also helped to organize the accompanying program of events and the concluding symposium. So he will already be familiar with the museum when he returns there as a member of the scientific staff, with primary responsibility for the woodwind, brass and percussion instruments. One of his first major tasks will be to put together a catalog of the woodwind instruments. But that is not all – the catalog of brass instruments also needs to be brought up to date. The main challenge, according to Breternitz, is to check the inventory and the entries in the data base in order to clarify inconsistencies and augment the existing information. The experience gained when writing his doctoral dissertation on brass instrument making in Berlin during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which is due for publication soon, will doubtless be of great help to him with many of the instruments.

Breternitz is fascinated by the variety of instruments and by the different aspects of the study of instruments, or “organology” as it is properly – and somewhat confusingly – called. Every instrument is different, he explains. In the case of historical instruments, there are significantly greater differences between individual examples, even those made as part of a series. Because instruments were largely manufactured by skilled craftsmen until the middle of the nineteenth century, when machine production was gradually introduced, most types of instrument exhibit a wide range of variations. The field of instrument making was also strongly characterized by regional schools of craftsmen. This helps organologists because the resulting differences allow them to draw conclusions about the manufacturer, even if an instrument bears no signature. 

Before returning to the Musikinstrumenten-Museum in June 2020, Breternitz had gained experience at two other museums, with mutually different orientations. From 2015, he worked at the Württemberg State Museum in Stuttgart for two years, as the curator of the collection of historical musical instruments. This collection, which can be found in the House of Music (located in a building called the Fruchtkasten, or “fruit box”), focuses on instrument making from the perspective of art history. The reason for this, as Breternitz explains, is that since the early modern era, the design of instruments has been significantly influenced by aesthetic considerations. So when you see a keyboard instrument with an extravagant shape, you should ask yourself whether it is also meant to look good as a piece of furniture. Of course, such questions have applied to instrument making from the earliest times. The forerunners of today’s musical instrument collections were the art and curiosity cabinets built up by monarchs and members of the nobility, who were keen to grace their collections with the most splendid and technically innovative instruments. In the seventeenth century, for example, valuable cornetts (also known as zinks) made of ivory were highly prized among wind instruments. Cornetts were usually made from a piece of wood, which was split in half along its length, hollowed out and then glued back together; with ivory, however, the material had to remain in one piece. The long, tapering hole therefore had to be bored very carefully into a curved ivory tusk, which was anything but easy. The organologist also has the task, says Breternitz, of deducing the methods used in manufacturing and to discover the old masters’ tricks of the trade. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the grand piano became an object of interest to architects. Every respectable home had to have a grand piano, which meant that these needed to harmonize visually with the design of the interior. Some of the models created were quite extravagant, such as those based on designs by Joseph Maria Olbrich, of which the Carl Mand grand piano in the Musikinstrumenten-Museum is a good example. At the State Museum in Stuttgart, Breternitz was also kept busy organizing concerts and, as in Berlin, there was close cooperation with universities and their academic staff. 

The musical instrument collection at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, which he joined as a research assistant in 2017, has a completely different orientation, towards the technical aspects of instrument making. Under the modernization plan for the Deutsches Museum, nineteen of its exhibitions are currently being completely redesigned, including the musical instrument exhibition. That is due to be reopened at the end of 2021 and so, until then, Breternitz will remain involved in Munich, in addition to his work in Berlin. This will also allow him to gather experience that will doubtless be useful in the forthcoming conceptual overhaul of the Musikinstrumenten-Museum in Berlin.

Breternitz is enthusiastic about the diversity of his subject. When people think about music today, he explains, they usually have in mind the modern, standard range of instruments on which music of every historical period and style is played. Efforts to reproduce historically authentic performance practice, with the assistance of organology, have enabled us to fill large gaps in our knowledge. It is not surprising that a connoisseur of historical instruments such as Breternitz prefers performances with instruments from the period concerned, or replicas of them, to concerts with more modern instruments. “The timbre and the music always match better when you take the historical aspects into account,” he explains. Since the original instruments cannot usually be played without damaging the substance, there is a need for replicas that are as faithful as possible to the originals. Here the organology specialists are in a position to help, by taking meticulous measurements and carrying out acoustic analyses. 

And what role does organology play in respect of the development of future instruments? Breternitz is very interested in this, too, and he follows the rapid pace of progress in the field of electronic instruments and the digital world closely. Not only have techniques such as sampling and physical modeling been part of electronic music for a long time, but they are also often used by film composers. He sees musical user interfaces, in particular, as a very powerful development, which could permanently change the ways in which people make music. Their main purpose is to facilitate the creation of music and to open up new dimensions. “Given the right software, you can now use an iPad to produce everything that you would otherwise need a whole orchestra for,” explains Breternitz. For a museum professional, his thinking is clearly outside the ‘museum box.’ For him, it is the coherence between the instrument, the piece of music, and the historical period that is foremost. When asked which music he likes listening to at home, he gives a surprising answer: “I’m not a fan of listening to so-called classical music from a loudspeaker. I prefer listening to music that has been made for loudspeakers, mainly rock and heavy metal.” Christian Breternitz simply loves variety.

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