Facilitating the study of items in the Collection by instrument makers

Previously, history and technology were of primary concern to the museum, within a display policy attempting to show as large a proportion of the substantial collection as p o s s i b l e . ^ O At present this amounts to over half of the collection on

permanent display, shown in groups of like instruments and within this, chronologically. This policy, despite the confines of cramped display and storage areas, is reflective of the museum's concern to serve in-house students of the University Music Faculty and period instrument-makers. In comparison, the new premises aim at a wider audience and interpretation on many musical levels. The overall design is less academic and taxonomic in tone: clearly, it is better to display fewer things but display them well.

At present, the display is stagnating because of lack of space and facilities; it cannot continue to collect as an on-going concern in its present circumstances. The architect's Brief is thus to provide a display area for the permanent collection

^^1989 Brief to the Architect and Museum Designer for the New Premises in St.

Cecelia's Hall Extension. The italics are m y own.

46 and further space for temporaiy exhibitions. The present display area at the Reid

Concert Hall shows about one thousand instruments in forty-four showcases; and the effect is so overpowering that it is difficult to appreciate the quality of the instruments on show. It is '...too crowded for a museum reaching the general public.'^l Increased space will facilitate a rotating display of eight or more thematic tableaux, some exploring areas of museum history through contextual display [e.g. 'The Orchestra of the Classical Period'] and others of homogenous display [e.g. 'The Development of the Flute']. The history tableaux will be able to include documents, graphics and non-instrumental material and should provide a welcome change of colour and interest to the displays. The tableaux system also has the advantage of adaptability, with one or two changes in the display each year being made and the possibility of adding new acquisitions. The inclusion of keyboard instruments should also provide visual interest by balancing the cases of

groups of smaller insuuments.

The display must please, inform and attract good will.'^^

The new premises are designed to be visitor friendly; much fore-thought has been put into the general ambience of the layout and presentation. The draft plans show a rectangular-shaped main gallery with well spaced cases and, instead of the usual flat and wall mounted cases, items from the collection hung both vertically on surfaces and angled to show two or more sides of an instrument of interesting design. The choice of what is displayed is selective and contextual, using accompanying text and background graphics of musicians playing the instrument being displayed.

^^1989 Architect's Draft Brief, point 8.2.1.

A major development will be the introduction of audio-visual material in order to ‘...communicate effectively with the museum-going p u b l i c ’ .'^3 The audio

facilities will take the form of a number of sound points: for example, there will be an oscilloscope linked to a trumpet display allowing the visitor to press down the trumpet valves (via a computer) and to see the resulting differences in the sine waves. The aim is to relate sound to instrumental technology in an enjoyable way. Students of acoustics may find this simplistic - the visitor focus has been altered dramatically from the academic -teaching style of the Reid Concert Hall display - but academic lessons in acoustics will continue in as much depth as before, though behind the scenes. In this way, it is possible for academic collections to display and interpret simultaneously on different levels of understanding. The prospect of purpose-built accommodation has acted as a catalyst to prompt a re-evaluation of the collection and its function. It shows that the typecasting of museums and their objectives is quite capable of diversification.

Collecting Policies

It has been shown that there are a considerable number of classifications that may be given to music collections, and that music museums - depending upon their policies - view their collections in vastly differing ways. This being so, it is also valid to consider how the visitors themselves view museum music collections: it will be found that there are many misconceptions. Most people equate music primarily with sound, and music in the 'museum environment' as being represented only by musical instruments, omitting a wealth of associated material, scores and manuscripts. Similarly with the term museum, it is a commonly held belief that museums only collect ‘old things’, and if in essence this is true, then placing music and museum together in a title results, for many people, in it

48 becoming a ‘collection of old musical instruments’, a statement which hardly does

justice to the material available.

The majority of music collections in the United Kingdom do have a strong historical bias, and so it is important to convey to an audience that, in general, these items were not collected initially simply because they were ‘old’, but rather because of their rarity value or social worth, and thus form part of a continuing chronology with contemporary instruments and music making. All items, with the passing of time become historical, yet it is unusual to find music museums collecting for the future: most collections consist of items that have 'value' because they are singular and no longer produced. A collecting policy shapes the nature of the collection and therefore what it is capable of: some collections are finite (the Gustav Holst Birthplace Museum, the exhibitions on the life of Mozart in Timro Museum and the British Library), while others either should be, or are, continuing to collect (respectively the Victoria and Albert Museum and the University of Edinburgh Collection). It is understood that in the current economic climate all museums are restricted by financial boundaries and cannot collect what they might ideally like to, but it is also realised that it is a false economy to wait until a new design of instrument is a hundred years old before acquiring it.

CHAPTER 2

GENERAL PUBLIC, LAYMAN OR SPECIALIST: WHOM DO MUSIC MUSEUMS SEEK TO ATTRACT?

It would be a difficult task to find someone who is completely uninterested in music; indeed it is probably true to say that music in all its myriad forms is one of the most prominent and unifying of interests that people possess. By this reasoning, museums with musical collections should be places of pilgrimage for the millions of people for whom music is an important part of life. However this is rarely the case in practice.

State-funded museums are legally obliged to exist for the 'Public Benefit' and be intellectually accessible to all. The 1994 'National Strategy for Museums' states that ‘Museums should try to accommodate the different learning capabilities and knowledge of all sectors of society’."*^ Museums, in general, are attempting to make their collections accessible to all members of the general public, however because of the intrinsic problems inherent in music as a display subject, it is rarely displayed to its kill potential, tending instead to polarise into the ‘academic’ or populist approaches personified by collections such as the University of Edinburgh Collection of Historic Musical Instruments and Rock Circus. Museums are trying to present a subject to individuals who each have a unique response to it, (although this may be influenced in terms of musical sophistication by age, education, innate musicality and personal taste). In marketing terms, ‘music’ covers a diversity of user groups, with the style of interpretation dependent upon the type of music and perceived 'type' of visitor. Thus Edinburgh University’s classical music collection produces an academic and

^^The Museums Association Museum Collections of National Significance: Annual

50 serious approach, while Rock Circus’s pop music collection is aimed at an

obviously younger and less serious end of the musical market; In the latter's case, popular museums have their place as long as their criteria is not based upon the number of visitors rather than the quality of the displays; an appraisal which ought to be true of any musical collection. Independent museums, which are financially dependent upon visitors, are more likely to enter the popular music business and tend to be the more adventurous - and commercial - in their displays. It is possible that the 'classical' collections might try to emulate some of the successful techniques used in such populist collections, if not perhaps the financial sensibilities behind it. For the majority of music museums it is now a question of how they can better serve a classically interested (though often intimidated) general public, without alienating their hard-core of existing visitors. This chapter attempts to look at what the museums visited did in order to attract their visitors and also examines the ways in which different types of musical collection bring in a specific audience.

Visitors' Attitude towards Music

People's taste in music is as diverse as the almost infinite number of sounds, styles and cultures from which music emanates. It would be an impossibility for a museum to attempt to cater for all interests; most music collections are specific, concerned with a well-defined category of musical presentation and the aims of the individual museum, as outlined in the previous chapter. There are, nevertheless, certain dominant areas of interest catered for by our museums which colour the way that most visitors would view 'music in museums' in the United Kingdom. In theory, there is scope for a musical collection to appeal to all people; potentially the music collection may draw in '...the organologist and musician, people who are artists, designers or craftsmen, ethnologists and anthropologists, those interested in church, military or local history, social historians and members of the

general p u b l i c .However, in spite of this, music as a museum subject still

caries an elitist tag, one that is probably exacerbated by the fact that many of these collections are historically based, with all of the pre-conceived 'dry-as-dust' imagery which has grown-up around old fashioned collections in museums. It is also the case that people experience music in the first instance aurally and so naturally equate music with sound rather than through its physical representation in the form of instruments and scores. It is understandable that the non-specialist visitor may feel intimidated by the object-based approach which these museum collections, by their very nature, have to take. It would seem that music as a museum topic is in an insidious position from the visitors' perspective; for to take the antithesis of the object-based collection - a visit to the National Sound Archive, this would provide all the sound of music without the substance, and would probably be an equally unsatisfactory prospect for the non-specialist. This is borne out by the fact that although it welcomes visitors, the National Sound Archive is still essentially an academic social-historical repository for sound; its function precludes any attempts to turn it into a visitor 'attraction'."^

Perceptions of 'Popular' and 'Specialist' Exhibitions

The approachability of music material in museums is usually dependent upon the nature of the collection. Here, specialist interests aside, human nature plays its part with the visitors concerned: people are unsure of things which are unfamiliar or new to them but respond more confidently towards things that they have experienced before; and in music's case, this means music that they have heard, or played, or studied in some way. This explains, for instance, the recent revival

'l^ciifford Bevan Musical Instrument Collections in the British

Js/es,(Winchester,1990), p.l4. Any discussion of the ’expert* and 'general ' visitor is of course subjective, but I believe that for the purpose of this work it is useful to have a ’general public' category whilst noting that even within this musical interest can vary, as do the individuals themselves.

^^This may be usefully contrasted with Rock Circus. Both institutions use sound recordings as the raw material for their collections but to quite different ends.

5 2

of interest in opera, spurred on by the almost cultist proportions of the 'Three Tenors' and the way in which certain pieces of classical music have become well- known through their use in advertisements."^^ This desire to latch on to the known and secure was apparent in the museums visited; by far the most popular collections were the Truro Museum and British Library exhibitions concerned with the life of Mozart, a personality already established as a favourite and accessible composer, whose bi-centenary celebrations had been understandably capitalised upon by musical and non-musical concerns alike throughout 1991. Both exhibitions were highly educational in tone, but with any labelling of 'intellectualism' or 'elitism' (all too common when dealing with a classical composer) off-set by the knowledge that Mozart's music is phenomenally popular with a broad spectrum of people, and, as one of the few great 'named' composers of whom everyone has heaid (and importantly have frequently heard his music as well), is an acceptable and approachable subject, inspiring not indifference out of ignorance but veritable hero-worship. These exhibitions were a success because

' . {'./'.-I-,/ /

they appeared from the outset to be accessible. 1991 was also the anniversary of Sergei Prokofiev's birth, yet there were no museum exhibitions celebrating this in the United Kingdom; and it is clear that even if there had been, they could not have hoped to attain the same kudos and mass-appeal of a Mozartian exhibition, for the reasons given above.

In recent years, the increasing number of museum collections devoted to mechanical music is also due in part to their non-classical ( and thus by extension, in the minds of much of the general public non-intellectual) status, concerned instead with popular entertainment rather than erudition. Most of these museums have scholarly programmes of research and conservation just as the more classical- historical museums do, but because their collections are connected with family

^^The ideology behind the marketing of classical music is discussed in the Introduction,

entertainment, (often with instruments from only the last sixty years or so), the visitor is given the reassurance oî familiarity. Mechanical music collections such as the Magnificent Music Machines (the Paul Corin Musical Collection, Liskeard, Cornwall) also invariably demonstrate their instruments, a feature unavailable in most academic museum collections for obvious reasons. The 'active' element in mechanical museums is their trump card and one of the fundamental reasons for their popularity as museums of music."^^ To the visitor, these museums appear to be less serious, without the 'restraints' of historical respect and connoisseurship found where academic collections are concerned. Such museums are regarded as places of entertainment rather than education, and so the general visitor's attitude towards mechanical music without, as yet, any tags of real antiquity and prestige, is a less deferential one.

Do Music Museums have a Specific Audience in Mind?

Generally, music museums are reluctant to admit that their collections might be tai'geted towards attracting any particular type of visitor. When questioned about this, most of the museums claimed that they tried to cater for everyone; it was only if pressed on this point that they would admit that some types of visitors prevailed more than others. Of the academic and historical museums, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, as national institutions, had the widest spectrum of visitor types, ranging from the specialist to the casual passer-by, while the smaller collections such as the Ranger's House ('the Dolmetsch Collection’) and the University of Edinburgh Collection tended to cater for musicians rather than the general public. Geographical location and

^^See Chapter 4 for a discussion on the ethics of restoring and playing musical instruments.

^^One of the questions asked in the music museum questionnaire was concerned with m useum s attempting to attract any particular 'type' of visitor, and if this was not the case, then did any specific group of people tend to predominate anyway? In the majority of the replies the museums claimed a cross-section of visitors but within this did single-out the categories of general public and specialist as definite 'types'.

54 accessibility play a role in this: when the museum is not in a prime site, it is

reasonable to assume that most of its visitors have made their visit there deliberately. However, it is one thing to 'come inside out of the rain' in London at the British Museum, but quite another to 'drop into' the Magnificent Music Machines, tucked away in the countryside at the end of several miles of Cornish lane.

Are the 'Types ' of Visitor Defined by the Nature of the Museum Itself?

It is obvious that where a visitor has made a specific journey to see a museum collection, then that individual has a purpose in mind (whether specialist or not); and the museum must try to respond to this interest. However, museums often find themselves facing a dilemma: academic museums such as the British Museum with a scholarly approach towards their collections, usually attract musical specialists because of the nature of their collections, while, in turn, these musicologists will go to the British Museum because it holds the type of musical infoimation they require. In the same way, the principal function of Rock Circus and the Magnificent Music Machines is to entertain, therefore most visitors will go there in order to be entertained. Catering for all tastes and levels of interest is, in practice, actually very hard to achieve; although finding a balance between education and entertainment in a musical context need not result in a 'Jack of all Trades’ approach. With care, it should still be possible for a musical collection to be accessible on different levels if the material is interpreted in a more visitor­ conscious way.

Can Musical Collections Appeal to Everyone?

The question of whether or not music is too academic a language to be equally of interest to the layman as the musician is manifest in the way a collection is displayed. Not everyone would automatically wish to see a display of keyboard instruments (or model trains or kitchen equipment, for example), yet thoughtfully presented, any collection should have something of interest in it to catch the