Introduction and Review of "The Musical Wonder House"
By Larry Smith
Hi, all. My name is Larry Smith, I'm a programmer for Digital Equipment - lot of software folks around here, I can see from the archives. Must be part of the mind set.
I've always loved mechanical devices - maybe in reaction to the highly non-mechanical devices that are part of my living - but I've always had the best affinity for musical devices. Music has always been very important to me, and music boxes have a special sound and quality all their own.
This was purely a latent interest until just a few months ago, when I discovered a couple books on the subject that went into the history of music boxes, the most informative being the Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical Instruments, which I'm sure is no surprise on this list. I was abso- lutely amazed at the huge industry that had flourished and vanished before I was born. And it's a damn shame, too - synthesizers and samplers can do amazing things, but there is just something about _hearing_ the real instrument that makes for a better experience.
Shortly thereafter, I discovered the Musical Wonder House Museum in Wiscasset, Maine. I sent a review of the museum to the net, and I've appended it below. I'd never imagined so many different types of music boxes!
I started my collection with a 4 1/2 Reuge (actually, Thorens) disk box from the San Francisco Music Box company. I couldn't justify the normal price, but it happened to be in March, and the SFMBC offers a 25% discount for your birth month, so I got it. I was pleased to latch onto it, even though it is far from antique, though it is a nice piece. Sometime later, I discovered two very nice cylinder boxes in antique stores for not-too-bad prices. One was a very nice-sounding model needing new dampers and casework, the other was a plain, but rather neat orchestral box which had suffered a bad run and needed repinning, not to mention new dampers, casework, etc. etc. It's now being restored at the Musical Wonder House, where it will shortly be joined by the cylinder box. For genuine antique collector's items, I prefer to let real experts - experienced people - do the actual work, but I'm very interested in building musical boxes based on what I've learned recently. I'll be mostly thinking along those lines as I read along, and I believe Jody has passed along a few of those thoughts already.
Here's the review of the Musical Wonder House:
The Musical Wonder House
"Preserving the Sounds of the Past"
On two recent occasions I had the opportunity to visit this fascinating museum based in Wiscasset, Maine. The proprietor, Danilo Konvalinka, has been collecting musical boxes since 1957, and his collection is now overflowing a large elegant home on High Street in downtown Wiscasset.
The collection includes hundreds and hundreds of boxes, from an 1815 cylinder to a 1994 reproduction cylinder, it fills eight large rooms and two central halls. Very nearly all of them are in prime condition after painstaking restoration.
There are two tours available, a lower-story tour, which is $10 a person and takes an hour, and a whole-house tour taking 3 hours and costing $30 a person. During the tour you will have the opportunity to hear a dozen or more beautiful musical boxes, along with a scattering of reproducing pianos and barrel organs, and the odd windup phonograph or two. The central hallway on the lower story can be toured unsupervised, and is filled with coin-operated musical boxes, restored in every detail but one: they take quarters where they used to take pennies. Bring lots.
Some other standout pieces include several magnificent orchestra boxes including a number with percussion, bell and reed or pipe organ effects, a number of large disk units including a Regina disk model built into a round table, and a number of automata of various types to round out the collection.
The Musical Wonder House has a store in the back that sells new and restored musical boxes, and a companion store in Lexington, Mass. that has an even larger selection. It also does restoration work, which I will be able to report on in more detail once they finish my own orchestral cylinder box, which needs the cylinder repinned and extensive case work. They can even repair broken combs (thankfully not necessary on my box).
The Musical Wonder House is open from Memorial Day to October most days. Lower-story tours are available any time, whole-house tours must be arranged (and are well worth it) by calling (207) 882-7163. Tell them I sent you - I don't get any benefit from that, but it might encourage Mr. Konvalinka to set up a web site so people who can't get to Maine can still enjoy a bit of his collection.
This seems to be a very active list, and I'm sure it's no small amount of work for Jody to maintain it. With luck, we'll shortly be hearing from a couple more enthusiasts here at Digital that I passes this along to, but with 100 people, it seems to me we have enough to warrant a newsgroup. If folks here think kindly of the idea, I'd be willing to start the process rolling. I've become a bit of a patron-saint for teeny newsgroups, my most recent effort (which passed) was rec.arts.puppetry.
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In addition to music boxes, I'm also keen on organs of various types. Several have been mentioned in the archives, but I wonder if everyone is aware of the organ in Hammond Castle in Gloucester, Mass. The building is interesting in its own right, but for the folks here, the best part is it was literally built around an enormous pipe organ - a favorite of Virgil Fox and E. Power Biggs. Sadly, the organ is out of commission right now, though you can hear tapes of it on the tour of the castle, but you can still see the console and some of the pipes - a few of the 8200 of them (yes, eight _thousand_, two hundred pipes, the largest privately-owned organ ever). Some of the pipes rise three stories or more in the towers of the castle. Hammond, no relation to the organ-building Hammonds, was America's second-most prolific inventor after Edison, with over 800 patents to his name, and he could _not_ play the organ! When he didn't have some big-name guest, he used rolls - yes, it was (and is) a player-organ.
I have a small grinder-type organ of my own, a recent acquisition, and a dozen rolls - which need to be recut, they are in too poor shape to be played. But they don't much resemble piano rolls, the cutouts control the wind directly, so I wonder if any of the roll-cutters on the list can handle rolls with such large cutouts, and relatively few notes across the width?
Well, that should be more than enough for now.
regards,
Larry Smith |
(Message sent Fri 4 Aug 1995, 21:48:14 GMT, from time zone GMT-0400.) |
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