The Virginia Musical Museum is a museum located in Williamsburg, Virginia, United States. A collection of over forty years is combined with donations from famous Virginia music artists. Making up the museum are rare, antique musical instruments, mechanical music machines, phonographs and many personal items from Virginia artists. The museum opened its doors to the public on June 22, 2013. [1]
In 1963, Jesse (Buddy) and Peggy Parker purchased their first music box, starting the collection. The couple started collecting instruments from around the world, but mostly from Virginia. The history of music in Virginia can be seen through the artists, objects and instruments on display.
Virginia Music Artists is the largest collection, with personal items from Patsy Cline, Ella Fitzgerald, Wayne Newton, Bruce Hornsby, Ralph Stanley, The Statler Brothers, Pearl Bailey, Roy Clark, Gene Vincent and other famous Virginia artists.
The Piano Gallery exhibit contains instruments showing the evolution of the piano, starting from the cimbalom and onward to the modern grand piano. One of the rarest keyboards in the gallery is a 1770 Joshua Shudi harpsichord, of which there are only two known in existence.
The phonographs exhibit contains phonographs made by Thomas Edison and RCA Victor with a sample of Edison’s tin foil phonograph, and portrays the history of recorded music.
The nickelodeon museum displays nickelodeons dating back from 1905. The Mills 'Violano-Virtuoso' plays a violin with a piano accompaniment.
The music box collection consists of table-top and floor-model instruments. There are some music boxes in the museum that are able to play bells and drums and one that can play a reed organ.
In the organ exhibit, there is a self playing pipe organ, a monkey organ, a glass organ, a Hammond organ, Reed organ, and a 300-year-old hurdy-gurdy, as well as others, and visitors can see and hear some the instrument play on iPads and monitors.
Many early amusement parks displayed a Laffing Sal, like the one on display in the amusement parks section. There is also a Wurlitzer Caliola band organ. When the Caliola played, it read music via punched-paper rolls or with a built-in keyboard to be played like a calliope. This exhibit also contains other amusement park attractions.
Musical toys, string instruments and a visual timeline of recorded music can also be found in the museum.
A player piano is a self-playing piano, containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism that operates the piano action via programmed music recorded on perforated paper, or in rare instances, metallic rolls, with more modern implementations using MIDI. The rise of the player piano grew with the rise of the mass-produced piano for the home in the late 19th and early 20th century. Sales peaked in 1924, then declined as the improvement in phonograph recordings due to electrical recording methods developed in the mid-1920s. The advent of electrical amplification in home music reproduction via radio in the same period helped cause their eventual decline in popularity, and the stock market crash of 1929 virtually wiped out production.
In music, the organ is a keyboard instrument of one or more pipe divisions or other means for producing tones, each played with its own keyboard, played either with the hands on a keyboard or with the feet using pedals.
A music box or musical box is an automatic musical instrument in a box which produces musical notes by using a set of pins placed on a revolving cylinder or disc to pluck the tuned teeth of a steel comb. The earliest known mechanical musical instruments date back to 9th-century Baghdad. In Flanders, in the early 13th century, a bell ringer invented a cylinder with pins which operate cams, which then hit the bells. The popular device best known to us today as a “music box” developed from musical snuff boxes of the 18th century and were originally called carillons à musique. Some of the more complex boxes also contain a tiny drum and/or bells in addition to the metal comb.
The Rudolph Wurlitzer Company, usually referred to as simply Wurlitzer, is an American company started in Cincinnati in 1853 by German immigrant (Franz) Rudolph Wurlitzer. The company initially imported stringed, woodwind and brass instruments from Germany for resale in the United States. Wurlitzer enjoyed initial success, largely due to defense contracts to provide musical instruments to the U.S. military. In 1880, the company began manufacturing pianos and eventually relocated to North Tonawanda, New York. It quickly expanded to make band organs, orchestrions, player pianos and pipe or theatre organs popular in theatres during the days of silent movies.
DeBence Antique Music World is a museum in Franklin, Pennsylvania whose collection contains more than 100 antique mechanical musical instruments, including music boxes, band organs, player pianos, a nickelodeon piano, as well as a number of other antiques. Many of the collection's mechanical instruments are rare; a number are among only a few manufactured, and a few are among the last in existence. Although the collection’s value cannot be measured, an offer for a sum of multiple millions of dollars was once rejected.
An experimental musical instrument is a musical instrument that modifies or extends an existing instrument or class of instruments, or defines or creates a new class of instrument. Some are created through simple modifications, such as cracked drum cymbals or metal objects inserted between piano strings in a prepared piano. Some experimental instruments are created from household items like a homemade mute for brass instruments such as bathtub plugs. Other experimental instruments are created from electronic spare parts, or by mixing acoustic instruments with electric components.
The Schubert Club, established in 1882, is a non-profit arts organization in Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States, that promotes the art of music, particularly recital music.
Gayleen Aiken was an American artist who lived in Barre, Vermont. She achieved critical acclaim during her lifetime for her naive paintings, and her work has been included in exhibitions of visionary and folk art since the 1980s. She is considered an Outsider artist.
Finchcocks is an early Georgian manor house in Goudhurst, Kent. For 45 years it housed a large, visitor-friendly museum of historical keyboard instruments, displaying a collection of harpsichords, clavichords, fortepianos, square pianos, organs and other musical instruments. The museum was run by the owners of the house, Richard and Katrina Burnett. It is now owned by Neil and Harriet Nichols who use it as a family home and a venue for residential piano courses and retreats.
The Musikmuseum is located in Basel, Switzerland and houses the country's largest collection of musical instruments. The museum is one of three components of Historisches Museum Basel. It presents five centuries of music history with three areas of emphasis: the history of music-making in Basel; concerts, choral music and dance; parades, festivals and signals.
The Aeolian Company was an American manufacturer of player organs, pianos, sheet music, records and phonographs. During the mid 20th century they surpassed Kimball to be the largest supplier of pianos in the United States, having contracts with Steinway & Sons due to their Duo-Art system of player pianos.
The Berlin Musical Instrument Museum is located at the Kulturforum on Tiergartenstraße in Berlin, Germany. The Museum holds over 3,500 musical instruments from the 16th century onward and is one of the largest and most representative musical instrument collections in Germany. Objects include a portable harpsichord once owned by Prussia’s Queen Sophie Charlotte, flutes from the collection of Frederick the Great, and Benjamin Franklin’s glass harmonica.
The Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) is located in Phoenix, Arizona. Opened in April 2010, it is the largest museum of its type in the world. The collection of over 15,000 musical instruments and associated objects includes examples from nearly 200 countries and territories, representing every inhabited continent. Some larger countries such as the United States, Mexico, India, China, and Brazil have multiple displays with subsections for different types of ethnic, folk, and tribal music.
The Musical Museum is a musical instrument museum and concert venue located in Brentford, London Borough of Hounslow, a few minutes' walk from Kew Bridge railway station.
The Museum of Musical Instruments of Milan exhibits over 700 musical instruments from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries with particular attention to Lombard instruments. The collection contains plucked instruments, Lombard and Cremonese violins, hunting horns, numerous wood instruments, bassoons, pianos and some ancient organs. In particular the Cremonese lutherie is appreciated all over the world for the high quality of its musical instruments. The museum also displays the equipment of the former Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano.
The American Treasure Tour is a tourist attraction established in 2010 and opened to the public for guided tours. Visitors travel through a large private collection that encompasses an eclectic variety of smaller collections. Included is one of the world's largest private collections of automatic music machines: nickelodeons, band organs, calliopes, photoplayers and music boxes. There are also classic cars, circus art, dolls and dollhouses, and a large assortment of popular culture miscellania. It is located in the 422 Business Center in the community of Oaks, Pennsylvania, west of Valley Forge National Historical Park just off of U.S. Route 422.
Music technology is the study or the use of any device, mechanism, machine or tool by a musician or composer to make or perform music; to compose, notate, play back or record songs or pieces; or to analyze or edit music. The earliest known applications of technology to music was prehistoric peoples' use of a tool to hand-drill holes in bones to make simple flutes. Ancient Egyptians developed stringed instruments, such as harps, lyres and lutes, which required making thin strings and some type of peg system for adjusting the pitch of the strings. Ancient Egyptians also used wind instruments such as double clarinets and percussion instruments such as cymbals. In Ancient Greece, instruments included the double-reed aulos and the lyre. Numerous instruments are referred to in the Bible, including the horn, pipe, lyre, harp, and bagpipe. During Biblical times, the cornet, flute, horn, organ, pipe, and trumpet were also used. During the Middle Ages, music notation was used to create a written record of the notes of plainchant melodies.
Electric music technology refers to musical instruments and recording devices that use electrical circuits, which are often combined with mechanical technologies. Examples of electric musical instruments include the electro-mechanical electric piano, the electric guitar, the electro-mechanical Hammond organ and the electric bass. All of these electric instruments do not produce a sound that is audible by the performer or audience in a performance setting unless they are connected to instrument amplifiers and loudspeaker cabinets, which made them sound loud enough for performers and the audience to hear. Amplifiers and loudspeakers are separate from the instrument in the case of the electric guitar, electric bass and some electric organs and most electric pianos. Some electric organs and electric pianos include the amplifier and speaker cabinet within the main housing for the instrument.
The Music House Museum has a collection of restored antique musical instruments, early radios, and recordings. It is housed in a 1909 dairy barn and a 1905 granary farmhouse, located between the communities of Acme and Williamsburg in Grand Traverse County of Northern Michigan. It was established in 1983 and is a result of a hobby by an architect and a mechanical engineer.
Featured in "The Original Williamsburg Magazine" September 2013; Also featured in "The Virginia Gazette" August 15, 2013; Featured in "Coastal Virginia Magazine" May/June 2014; Featured in "Williamsburg's Next Door Neighbors" May 2014