Breathing New Life into Historical Instruments. How to Monitor Corrosion

‘To play or to display’ is the dilemma that museums have to face, given the increasing trend towards historically informed performance. Brass instruments can suffer corrosion both during and after playing due to the high humidity inside them. To forestall or at least reduce corrosion, drying with a fan has been chosen as a preventive measure. The state of corrosion inside the tuning slides of the instruments was determined with a specially developed electrochemical sensor. The results of the project show that drying with a fan indeed reduces ongoing corrosion, when compared to a group of instruments played without preventive measures that showed an increasing corrosion rate over time.