Sabine Katharina Klaus receives the 2026 Curt Sachs Award

The Board of Governors of the American Musical Instrument Society takes great pleasure in naming Sabine Katharina Klaus as the recipient of the 2026 Curt Sachs Award.

Sabine Klaus completed her MA in musicology in 1990 and received her PhD in musicology from Tübingen University in 1994, with a five-volume dissertation based on her study of early keyboard instruments at the Münchner Stadtmuseum. She held assistant curatorial positions at museums in Basel, Nuremberg, and Vienna, and received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art before joining the National Music Museum in 2000. There, until retiring in 2023, Klaus served as the Joe R. and Joella F. Utley Curator of Brass Instruments and Professor of Music at the University of South Dakota. Along with teaching and cataloging the vast Utley Collection, her responsibilities involved preparing traveling exhibitions and related educational materials for the general public.

Following the path of her doctoral dissertation, over more than thirty years Sabine Klaus has undertaken fundamental research into the history of stringed keyboard instruments, especially Germanic clavichords and pianos. In 2000 she received AMIS’s Frances Densmore Prize for an article on German square pianos. But her expertise extends further. Her magisterial five-volume study of the development of trumpets and other high brasses, based on her work with the Utley Collection but extending far beyond its limits, is unparalleled in scope and importance; the first volume (2012) earned AMIS’s Bessaraboff Award. Klaus’s contributions to organological literature include numerous entries in major encyclopedias and many influential articles covering a wide range of historical, acoustical, and performance-related subjects, some written in cooperation with distinguished scholars who hold her in high esteem. Her widely cited essay “More Thoughts on the Discipline of Organology” (Historic Brass Society Journal 14, 2002, http://historicbrass.org/images/hbj/hbj-2002/HBSJ_2002_JL01_001_Klaus.pdf) reflects her deep commitment to her profession. Among other topics, her publications explore issues of instrument conservation, offer biographical accounts of instrument makers, and present detailed analyses of individual instruments. In all these areas, Sabine Klaus’s work, informed by her musicality, shows penetrating insight into the complexities of instrument design, manufacture, and use, explicated with clarity and precision. In addition, since 2005, she has edited the “Historical Instruments Window” section of the International Trumpet Guild Journal.

Sabine Klaus made significant acquisitions for the National Music Museum and helped raise that institution’s stature internationally as a center for instrument research and public education. Her initiative inspired a generation of USD students and visiting scholars. Subsequently she served as Mirrey Keyboard Instrument Cataloguer at the University of Edinburgh, where she moved after the untimely death of her husband and close collaborator, the late Malcolm Rose. Dr. Klaus remains engaged in organizations such as AMIS, ICOM-MUSIC (formerly CIMCIM), the Galpin Society, and the Historic Brass Society, where her accomplishments and collegiality have won universal respect. In 2017 Sabine Klaus received the Historic Brass Society’s highest honor, the Christopher Monk Award.

Curt Sachs Award committee: Laurence Libin (chair), Aurelia Hartenberger, Geoffrey Burgess