If you enter any surviving early 20th-century Belgian dance hall, there’s a good chance you’ll be in front of something…
Browsing: Musical Instruments
Every instrument has a story. This category covers the history, mechanics, and cultural significance of musical instruments across every era — from the pipe organ and the player piano to the modern synthesiser. Whether you are a player, a collector, or simply curious, there is always something worth discovering here.
Watching a Polyphon music box play has a subtle, unnerving quality. A waltz emerges as the disk rotates and the…
There’s something quietly disorienting about watching a piano play itself. The keys dip and rise without a single finger touching…
If you walk into the right antique store in London or a dusty auction house in the Midwest of the…
A strip of perforated paper, somewhere in a climate-controlled archive, shows Sergei Rachmaninov performing a piece he recorded in New…
A pipe organ placed inside a Congregational church in Beer, Devon, has a subtle allure. Not because of the church…
At the Troxy in Stepney, east London, there’s a moment when you hear something before you realize what you’re seeing.…
A crate containing what would turn out to be a tiny but significant piece of British musical history arrived at…
There is an instant difference between sitting at a church organ and a theater organ. Although the keys, pedals, and…
The Rudolph Wurlitzer Company was finishing and shipping one theater organ every day in 1926, at the height of the…