Exploring historical musical instruments in the past and present
John Irving, Director of the IMR and musicologist and professional fortepiano performer, collaborated in a chamber music lecture-recital at the Horniman Museum, with two professional performers from London period instrument orchestras in an exploration and presentation of significant practice-as-research issues in Mozart’s chamber music. The lecture recital related to instruments in the Horniman’s world-renowned musical instrument collection (soon to be augmented with instruments from the Victoria & Albert Museum) and related modern copies to historical originals in the museum’s collections. This is consonant with the Museum’s own educational outreach policy and was aimed at diverse audiences from east and south-east London.
Previous knowledge transfer activity has successfully engaged a variety of communities in London in performance practice research. In addition, previous activity has helped to determine the future shape of outreach work within the IMR’s new DeNOTE Performance Practice Research Centre which has already held events in collaborations with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the Royal College of Music, and the British Library). Performance research work within the IMR is reaching out beyond academe, as reflected in the shifting profiles of attendees at many recent IMR events. Players from London orchestras, other professional musicians, library and museum staff, musical instrument makers -- all are represented.
The lecture-recital focused on the intimate relationship of historically informed performance and organology, and facilitated the Horniman Museum’s aspirations to make its musical instrument collections more widely known, chiming with its educational outreach policy. By focusing on repertoire that included a keyboard instrument, a string instrument and a woodwind instrument (all of which were represented in good modern copies in day-to-day use by the professional performers involved), it was possible to (i) make historical originals of such instruments within the Horniman’s collections ‘come alive’ for museum visitors, thus fulfilling part of their remit from the current funders, the DCMS); and (ii) project the IMR’s research underpinning of such performance opportunities.
Within the setting of the Horniman Museum, this event communicated a process of rediscovery and creative engagement with these fascinating instruments to fresh audiences for chamber music in a way that was both accessible and visually demonstrable; it showcased the fundamental and inter-related roles of research and museum stewardship within all of this activity; finally, it highlighted the vital yet all-too-frequently invisible contribution of research institutions and the museum sector to the UK’s ‘creative industries’.
