The work of French musicologist, ethnologist, curator, and critic Andre Schaeffner (1895 - 1980) grew naturally out of his first organological studies of the history of Western classical instruments in the late 1920s and came to be encapsulated in his monumental and wide-ranging Origine des instruments de musique, the fruit of labour in Paris and in the field between 1931 and 1936. Almost 80 years after its first publication, the scientific relevance and influence of Schaeffner's primary hypothesis - that the origins of music can be traced to the human body through gesture, dance, and the...