Parishioners go to The Musical Museum

On Saturday 21st March 2009, a party from St Peter's visited the Musical Museum, which is situated on the north side of Brentford High Street, overlooking the Thames and halfway between the Watermans Centre and Kew Bridge.

The museum was founded in 1963 by the late Frank W Holland MBE and was originally installed in the redundant church of St George, not far away from its present location. It was an old church (the church school was endowed in 1786) and with a leaking roof and no heating it wasn't a suitable building for a museum. The museum, which has charitable status, is now housed in a brand new purpose-built unit of three storeys with its own car park.

 We were very fortunate to have a conducted tour by Mr Michael Ryder, the Chairman of the Trustees, who had a wealth of information to impart. He described the workings of each instrument, the company who made it, and the likely people who would have bought them. It is the policy of the museum not only to exhibit these old instruments, but to play them, which entails repairs and replacement of defective parts.

The oldest instrument was a cylinder music box c1830, manufactured in Switzerland, as constructing the numerous pins by which it operates, required the skill of watchmakers. We were shown and were played a variety of mechanical music instruments, which were developed over the 19th and 20th centuries - too many to detail, but I will mention two more.

  One of the organs in the museum

The Pianola, which was operated by holes in paper rolls, originally as a unit outside the piano and subsequently included as part of the piano itself. Perhaps the most remarkable was the Violano-Virtuoso, which played a real violin accompanied by a piano and was started by dropping a coin in a slot. It is the only commercial instrument in the museum.

 We were then taken to the first floor by lift to a large auditorium with a stage. In the centre of the stage was a Wurlitzer Cinema organ, built in America in 1928 and installed in the Regal cinema at Kingston in 1931 where it operated until 1972. This was a high point of the day for me, as I am old enough to remember these wonderful organs rising out of the floor of the cinema, beautifully illuminated, after the feature film had ended and the organist then giving a performance. It was suggested that there are probably only two left in the country - one in Leicester Square and the other at Blackpool Tower . Mr Ryder played the organ, illustrating the sounds of individual instruments of an orchestra, which this organ can then reproduce.

We were provided with a welcome light lunch, which ended a most interesting and enjoyable day. The Revd Mark Powell arranged this visit and to him we offer our thanks.

Dennis Lee-Smith

 Two of our younger members of the congregation also enjoyed the trip as you can see below...

 I found the museum very interesting, because the guide played on the instruments as well as talking about them. I thought the prettiest instrument was probably the Wurlitzer. It glowed while he made lots of interesting sounds. It was really cool, because there were lots of switches around it and when he pushed a switch and played the keys, it made the sound of that instrument. It had 50 or 60 switches!

I also liked the 'invisible man' piano. I called it that because when it was switched on, the piano keys began to play all by themselves. There were even instruments from the 1900's there!

For pudding at lunch in the cafeteria we had really yummy rich chocolate cake.

Erin Crisp (aged 7)

 My favourite instruments were the Wurlitzer, because it was unique, and the 'invisible man' piano, because it looked really alive.

 Wurlitzer Organ

I learned about how people used to entertain themselves and they were cleverer than I thought. I didn't realise that they would be that good at engineering to make musical instruments.

I liked the little music boxes and some of them were ever so detailed in their design. Some had bees to tap the notes, some had little men that turned their heads and nodded as they banged the drums. Not many of the old music boxes survived, because lots of people lost their keys and couldn't play them. One or two of the organs were so big that they stretched out behind by three metres and people used to have these in their houses!

Niamh Crisp (aged 9)

Links

Audio