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Mechanical Musical Instruments in the Avant Garde Project

The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD. As part of that project, I thought of releasing an installment of recordings of mechanical musical instruments as a kind of "found" avant garde, because I enjoy listening to the complex timbres of those instruments in the same spirit as I listen to late-20th-century electroacoustic music.

Once I looked into this, I realized how few high-quality recordings of mechanical musical instruments are available for free download on the internet. Since I have a number of LPs of this material in my stacks, and an analog rig that is near state-of-the-art, I decided to transcribe more than one CD of this material, for the enjoyment of mechanical musical instrument enthusiasts and researchers.

To the best of my knowledge, none of these recordings has ever been released on CD, and so they have been commercially unavailable for a generation or more. Out of respect for the individuals and organizations whose collections are represented in these recordings, as well as for the engineers and record labels that made possible their original release, I would not want disseminate these recordings over the objections of those involved. So if you are affiliated with any of those individuals or organizations, and would like me to remove recordings over which you have proprietary rights, please let me know and I will take care of it. See the AGP copyright policy for more details.

I recognize that many of the visitors interested in mechanical musical instrument recordings may not be especially interested in the rest of the AGP, so I have constructed this index page to link to all such material in the archive.

Four AGP installments have been devoted to recordings of mechanical musical instruments:

AGP44 features recordings of street organs, music boxes, and a few other instruments from the collection of Heinrich Brechbühl and from the National Museum from Musical Clock to Street Organ in Utrecht.

AGP45 features recordings of a wide range of mechanical musical instruments from the Musée Baud, L'Auberson, as well as more recordings of street organs from the National Museum from Musical Clock to Street Organ.

AGP46 features recordings of orchestrions and related instruments made in the American International Galleries in Irvine, California, and from the collection of Doyle H. Lane at The Player Piano Museum in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

AGP47 features recordings of music boxes in the Rita Ford Collection and the collection of Murtogh Guinness, as well as music boxes and street organs from the collection of Peter Schifferli.

Each of these comprises one CD of material, and includes transcriptions of the liner notes and/or scanned images of the instruments. The audio files are in FLAC format. FLAC is a lossless compression format that decompresses to produce CD-quality WAV files that can then be burned to an audio CD. The software for decompressing FLAC files is free and easy to use. See Technical Information for links to the software and further information on using FLAC files.

In addition to the above, you may be interested in the following supplemental collections. To download files, right-click on each of the following links and select SAVE LINK AS.

Recordings made at the First Swiss Festival of Barrel Organs, Arosa, 1979
    Side 1
    Side 2
    ZIP archive of images and liner notes

Additional recordings of music boxes from the collection of Peter Schifferli
    Side 1
    Side 2
    ZIP archive of images and liner notes

All told, this collection of transcriptions comprises over six hours of high-quality recordings of mechanical musical instruments. I hope you get as much enjoyment out of listening to them as I have.


 

All rights for materials presented on dream.cs.bath.ac.uk/AvantGardeProject belong to the artists.

All materials are for non-commercial and/or educational use only.