Day 13 (Friday) Part Deux. Instruments!

Instruments!!!
Our class went to see the museum of musical instruments! It was absolutely fascinating! I didn't do everything there was to do because I am definitely taking Matt there when he arrives. I've included several pictures here, but my camera's battery died, so I will post more after my second visit!

Old trombone style instruments. The one on the left is the second oldest trombone in the world!

Older natural trumpets.

Predecessors to the string family. The one on the right is the viol, similar in body to the double bass.

Lutes and flutes

A keyboard with billows that doubles as a chess/backgammon board!

An early recorder family

Notice the carving at the top of this lute-like instrument.

A table with music written all the way around, so you can play as an ensemble from any point.

Another keyboard with hideaway keys that doubled as a table.

Early guitars

Timpani!!

Ornate 1700s violins with carvings at the top.

A bust of Haydn

 Richard Fuller plays an actual keyboard from the 1700s!

Another predecessor to the string family. A lot of these early instruments went out of style because they were hard to keep in tune.

A very efficient way to play quartets!

Detail on the back of a bass. During the 1700 and 1800s the look of an instrument was just as important as the sound.

An early player piano, kind of like a big music box.

Typical instruments of a Turkish army. Notice the triangle is closed. Modern ones are open on one corner. When it's open, the triangle has a sustained tone, these closed ones don't sustain a pitch, so little rings were added to help with that.

Leopold Mozart's violin!

A very funky keyboard that tried to deal with tuning problems of the day. The third row from the top is the C major scale, with C being the dots. The next row up would be C# and the row down from C would be Cb. As a result, C# and Db (enharmonic in today's system) were in two separate places! Imagine the tuning nightmare!

A piano Beethoven played! It has pearl keys for the naturals and tortoise shell for the accidentals! Beautiful!

More innovations: walking sticks that doubled as instruments, including a portable keyboard! Can we say 'keytar'??

Early guitars.

As I said before, my camera died at this point. The very next thing I swooned over was two of Clara Schumann's pianos! The neat thing that this museum is doing is creating recordings of music on these actual instruments! I had to buy a cd in the giftshop: Clara Schumann being played on Clara Schumann's piano!! It great! This was you get to hear the actual sounds produced by those instruments. The sound of her piano from 1868. It has a very mellow sound to it.