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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 Additional recordings of music boxes from the collection of Peter
Schifferli 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. |
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