Musical Museum, Brentford

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 Musical Museum
A sample of The Musical Museum's instrument collection

The Musical Museum contains a significant collection of self-playing musical instruments, and one of the world's largest collections of historic musical rolls. The museum houses rare working specimens of player pianos, orchestrions, reed organs, and violin players. The largest exhibits include a fully restored Wurlitzer theatre organ (attached to a roll playing mechanism and Steinway grand piano) and a 12-rank roll playing residence organ.

The instruments and exhibits are arranged in three main galleries; the building also houses a concert hall which doubles as a cinema that seats up to 230 people, and a cafe.

Mostly run by volunteers, the museum is open on Tuesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and Bank Holidays. A tour guide demonstrates the instruments at 11:00, 13:00 and 15:00.

Wurlitzer, Brentford Musical Museum, London

History

The Museum was founded in 1963 by Frank Holland MBE (19101989) as The British Piano Museum, who believed that self-playing musical instruments should be preserved and played. In 1975, he was interviewed for the TV Show 'Going Places', in which he reminisced about reading an article about there being about eight-hundred abandoned churches in Britain, so he decided to find a suitable one to house the instruments, 'St.George's', Brentford.[1]. He later wrote of his experiences in the book 'A Boxful of Rolls'. It moved to a newer building nearby in 2009.

gollark: PHP has... point 1 going for it?
gollark: hhaahahahahahahahahahhhahahahahaha
gollark: It's functionally pure, so your code can be replaced with `main = return ()` with no real change.
gollark: Nonsense. Haskell is perfectly maintainable.
gollark: String interpolation, while quite convenient, can lead to injection things since it's easier than doing things properly with bound parameters or HTML escaping or whatever.

See also

References

  1. "Piano Museum". www.britishpathe.com. Retrieved 13 January 2016.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.