Before music filled the room.
Wood, strings and the instrument maker’s hand.
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Art & Music
Music, art and culture, told through instruments, materials and the people who gave them form.
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16 storiesStories from this world.
The Bird Goes Back In
The Bruguier family’s Swiss singing-bird boxes concealed a performance beneath a painted landscape. Bellows supplied the voice and shaped metal controlled the movements; behind the familiar maker’s name were two Charleses, a son-in-law and a woman who pinned musical cylinders.
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Before the Line Broke
A few gaps in a blue border help order surviving impressions of Hokusai’s Great Wave. They open a history of carved wood, hand printing and colour that changed both in the workshop and afterwards.
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The Cost of a Clean Sheet
Alois Senefelder wanted to print his own plays. Music brought him a partner and paying work, but a better press began ruining the paper. Making lithography useful took more than a mark on limestone.
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Permission to Improve
Josiah Wedgwood borrowed the Portland Vase, a celebrated Roman glass vessel, in 1786. Copying its figures in pottery required new colours, different ways of making shade and a decision about which imperfections to keep.
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Mary, at Several Speeds
Edison's tinfoil phonograph brought a voice back from a sheet of metal. In 1878, getting it to speak before an audience meant adjusting the machinery, shouting into it and knowing what to do when the first attempt failed.
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The Drive Is in the Drawings
A wheel turns and a pair of shears opens and closes, although the machine is printed on paper. A surviving Victorian zoetrope and its picture strips reveal how much of the action had to be settled before anyone spun the drum.
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A Little Longer
Stradivari’s surviving forms helped a workshop repeat its work. Matching one to a finished violin takes more than following the outline.
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Twenty Keys
Adolphe Sax’s new instrument needed players. Georges Kastner explained the fingering, and military pupils learnt to make music with it.
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The Glass Moves
Benjamin Franklin brought spinning glass bowls within reach of two hands. Marianna Kirchgässner turned that possibility into a career, with music by Mozart and a new instrument made for her in London.
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Music Sold Separately
Around 1889, a Melbourne bookseller's music department ordered a German Symphonion. Customers paid a penny to set it playing; changing the tune meant opening the cabinet and lifting out a large steel disc.
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Rome at Hand
Giacomo Raffaelli rebuilt an ancient Roman favourite in a circle of glass just twelve centimetres wide. His doves belonged to a trade that let travellers take the city's monuments home, one tiny piece at a time.
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The Parishioners Needed Light
Louis Daguerre's diorama brought theatrical illusion into a village church in 1842. A priest objected to the gathering spectators and the gloom. Later restorers faced a different problem: repairing the canvas without blocking the light.
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Six Exquisite Chromatropes
Mechanical magic-lantern slides made painted figures move and coloured patterns revolve. In Adelaide in 1848, Henry Kesterton's ambitious show depended on a lecturer, a limited supply of gas and an agreement that the two men remembered differently.
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The Fish Was Already There
All seven fish remain after the Silver Swan has apparently swallowed one. The Bowes Museum’s bird has a concealed catch, an altered movement and a wooden understudy built to test how a silver neck should turn.
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A Million Points in Granite
A walking transport frame, a bargain with the city and thirteen years of carving: how Gustav Vigeland’s Monolith reached the centre of an extraordinary park.
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