Sanfona – Terminology of musical instruments in portuguese in Portugal and Brazil

The question of terminology is pertinent in all areas of musicology, but especially in the area of organology – the designations of musical instruments and their constituent parts. As well as differences between the terms used in Brazil and Portugal, there are internal discrepancies within each country. What then are the terms that should be used for scientific purposes, where exactness and consistency are essential? The “Sanfona” Project seeks to answer this question through a large-scale survey of the terms used, in the past and in the present, in order to try to identify patterns of use, with a view to recommending terms for use in scientific contexts in the two countries.

Developed by the Nucleus for the Study of the History of Luso-Brazilian Music, the ‘Sanfona’ project has two complementary methodologies: the inventory and study of the current terminology used by instrumentalists, luthiers and museologists to specify instruments and their morphological components; and the collection of designations about the same object in historical sources, both handwritten and printed, such as catalogues from Portuguese and Brazilian music companies; instrumentation treatises; music dictionaries; scores and other relevant documentation.

One of the project’s aims is to train researchers for the same area of research, through regular training courses, which will enable more comprehensive research to be carried out into particular regionalisms. The goal is therefore to provide researchers, teachers, museologists, luthiers and enthusiasts with a wide range of musical instrument terminology, in an open-access database, and the translation into Portuguese of the respective classification systems in force, two indispensable tools for the development of more specific research projects and more uniform teaching of the Organology and Musical Iconography courses in higher education in music and musicology.