Mechanical Music

I was lucky enough to pay a visit to London's Musical Museum in Brentford this week and get a guided tour and demonstration of the various instruments; the museum's title is something of a misnomer. It is in fact a museum of automatic or self-playing instruments, from the common-or-garden pianola (centerpiece of every suburban parlour before the coming of the wireless) to the grandly-titled orchestrion, which aims to reproduce the sound of an entire orchestra playing in your living room via a variety of pipes and other bells and whistles — the latter quite literally!

It must be twenty years or so since my last visit and I really don't remember much of it: the cavernous grey-stone church has been replaced by a brightly-painted modern barn, courtesy of the National Lottery, but the collection still bears something of a resemblance to a room into which someone has endeavoured to stuff as many pianos and/or radiograms as possible, and has the familiar scent of old polish and faintly warm electrics. In point of fact most of the collection have the most primitive of electrical requirements, being driven by pneumatic means and/or regulated by exquisitely detailed mechanical controls — apparently electric motors at the turn of the twentieth century couldn't be relied on for that sort of fine adjustment.

The instruments that most impressed me from a purely musical point of view were a small Victorian musical-box that sported a remarkable sweetness of tone and set of bass notes, plus an amazing turn of volume, and a late-model and highly sophisticated player-piano from about 1940 — one of the last ever of its kind — which played back for us a piano roll recorded by a long-forgotten lady performer in Twenties style, complete with cascading spread chords and every turn of expression 'cut' into the original recording. Watching the piano keys depress themselves in sequence across the keyboard, it was almost impossible not to start imagining a ghostly presence poised in front of the instrument, putting on her best show for the benefit of the punters. It's true what they say — a piano roll recording can reproduce a performance in the way that no disc can capture, least of all the primitive recording devices of the era...

I was somewhat surprised to find that the museum shop sells racks of brand new shrink-wrapped piano rolls, in addition to a battered collection of second-hand boxes — apparently they are still being manufactured, and can even be cut to order if you supply your own MIDI files: a perfect example of new technology in service of the old! (Edit: Here is a page containing links to a number of sample recordings; now picture the piano playing by itself without human intervention!)

Instruments fascinating more for their ingenuity than their tone included a domestic barrel organ dating from before the Battle of Waterloo, the more traditional nineteenth-century street variety (which proved incredibly loud for its size), a pub piano with a 'jazz box' attachment to provide somewhat over-enthusiastic percussion, a weight-driven orchestrion that resembled an ancient tower clock (and which we didn't hear working), and last but not least the amazing coin-operated Violino-Virtuoso from the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago. This automatic violin & piano combination amazed the non-violinists in our company, but, I'm afraid, left me cringing. While it seems to be easy to create a self-playing piano, the sound produced by the violin resembled that of a flashy but quite unmusical amateur with a violent addiction to vibrato; the tone was scrapy and completely without expression of any kind, as the little rosined wheels turned and the mechanical fingers came up to stop the strings. In the higher ranges it could have passed for a gloopy Palm Court performance, but the low notes were positively painful. Like the Infant Prodigy, that it could play at all was a miracle — that it could play well was perhaps too much to ask.

The finale was provided by the museum's very own Wurlitzer cinema organ upstairs, previously housed in the Regal cinema, Kingston-upon-Thames. At the time of our visit, the re-installation of this instrument was not quite complete, so we had to be content with playback of its performance plus an authentic advertising slide-show promoting the then-forthcoming Rogers-Astaire musical attractions. However, we were confidently assured that concerts should begin this year (and I hope will prove a useful moneymaker for this humble but unique museum, which relies heavily upon its volunteers).