I had known about the Kew Bridge Steam Museum, with its gigantic beam engines, ever since I was big enough to want to ride on a steam train, but had never heard of the Musical Museum just a little way west of it until, after our jaunt around Richmond Park, Tom and Bex took me there. It’s quite easy to miss, tucked away in a plasticky new West London housing development, and incredibly good. For this is a museum of musical machines: a collection, spanning the last century and a half, of dozens of different devices for recording and replaying noises which, magnificently, keeps them all in working order. 

With a small group of mixed ages, we were shown around the collection by a wonderful old gent called Roy, who explained and briefly played each one. I’d grown up with Leonard de Vries’ incredible Victorian Inventions book on one shelf and The Best of Que Sera on the next, so was already vaguely familiar with wax phonograph cylinders and the like, but some of these were brand new to me: a very early metal disc (adjusting quite how old the gramophone record-laserdisc-CD-DVD-hard drive concept), various bonkers machines with actual chopped-off bits of violin and trumpet inside them, and increasingly sophisticated ways of getting music out of a piano without a pianist.

An early pianola: it’s a big set of mechanical fingers which play a piano for you, which was quickly superseded by teaching pianos to play themselves. But this can be applied to a modern keyboard to play ridiculous electronic parps.

 

Piano-player was superseded by self-playing piano, and rolls which mechanistically struck notes on cue replaced by ways of actually recording a specific pianist, demonstrated by this utterly ghostly recording of Shostakovich (I… think?)

 

 

 

 

 

A side room had a number of slightly more modern devices – things I don’t recognise with MOOG written on them, a rotary speaker I more or less understand, a gloriously tacky early theremin, ancient batteries and a home hydro-generator for when houses had water but not electricity plumbed. Fancy! It also had this incredibly louche looking saxophonist.

And finally, after we had an evening coffee and parted, I found this hidden on my coat. I have no idea how on earth Tom made it.

The Musical Museum is obviously closed at the moment cos of the whole Pandemic Thing, but I look forward to taking certain family members back there, and highly recommend it.

 

 

 

PS: All this reminds me strangely of another machine that makes noise: Jolly Jack at the Hull museum. Enjoy!