3 - Sounding Instruments

Summary

In an 1885 Magazine of Music article, George Bernard Shaw described his frustration at the way musical instruments were exhibited at the London International Inventions Exhibition:

No less satisfactory exhibition can be conceived than a collection of musical instruments surmounted by notices that visitors are requested not to touch. Even a Stradivarius violin is not pleasant to look at when it is standing on end in a glass case. You may not hold it to the light to make the lucid depths of the varnish visible … you cannot hear the sound, apart from which it is the most senseless object extant; and your personal independence is irritated by the feeling that what prevents you from satisfying your curiosity by force of arms is not your conscience, but the proximity of a suspicious policeman, who is so tired of seeing apparently sane men wasting their time over secondhand fiddles and pianofortes, that he would probably rather arrest you than not, if only you would give him a pretext for the capture.

As understandable as the restrictions placed on touching or playing musical instruments were – particularly given the sonic chaos of the early exhibitions before such rules were introduced – Shaw was not the only one who was unsatisfied with these arrangements. The primary mode of engagement with objects displayed at exhibitions was visual, and as we have seen, as far as musical instruments were concerned, the press and public went to great lengths to give these ‘senseless objects’ meaning, without them needing to be heard. But for manufacturers and exhibitors, this ignored the primary function of the instruments. While some makers clearly took pride in the physical aesthetic qualities of their products, all wanted their instruments to be able to demonstrate their reason for existing: making music. Thus, at all the exhibitions in this study where instruments were displayed, the manufacturers themselves arranged public recitals to fully exhibit their wares.

Demonstration recitals were given on a variety of different instruments across the exhibitions. At London 1885, for example, there were concerts of wind instruments arranged by firms such as Boosey, Besson, and Metzler, violin recitals on instruments by Jeffrey James Gilbert (1850–1942) or George Gemünder (1816–99), and a few on the banjo by Arthur Tilley (1847–1921) playing his own instruments.