ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how historic house collections have been represented in music bibliographies to date. The significance of music to any given property might be more or less obvious. A tendency to focus on standout and eye-catching collections, or even just individual, unique, items within them, has precluded a bigger picture based in a wider socio-historical frame to fully reveal items' importance. Resources for understanding English Heritage's musical objects were less extensive than those available for the National Trust: there is no comparable database for their estimated 500,000 objects. Information about instruments was mostly sourced from National Trust Collections, which offers the ability to search by property for “Musical instruments, devices, and recordings”. The wide variety of objects in these collections is of interest to scholars of music-making in historic houses, but many catalogues include more concise and general descriptions of physical objects, and therefore lack the intricacies of detail that may contribute to scholarly study.
