Museum of Music Automatons

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Museum entrance, punched tape graphics in the pavement
Street organ in the entrance hall

The Museum for Music Automatons is located in the Solothurn municipality of Seewen in Switzerland and is a museum owned by the Swiss Confederation.

The museum houses a collection of Swiss music boxes and record boxes , mechanical jukeboxes , phonographs , gramophones and clocks.

history

The Seewen Museum for Music Automatons owes its existence to the passionate collecting activity of Heinrich Weiss-Stauffacher , who over decades amassed a comprehensive collection of Swiss music boxes, record boxes, automatons, orchestrions and clocks with musical mechanisms to form one of the largest collections in the world. In 1979 this collection was opened to the public. A private museum was created, which was donated to the Swiss state in 1990. A generous extension, which doubled the exhibition area and serves the requirements of a modern museum, was completed in 2000 and also houses a restaurant with a viewing terrace.

The institution, headed by Christoph E. Hänggi, is a tourist and cultural figurehead for the region of Northwestern Switzerland and the Black Boy Country .

Exhibitions and guided tours

Special exhibition 2014/2015 about the jukebox

During the tour of the permanent exhibition on the subject of "Switzerland - the land of sound pioneers", one of the focal points of the collection, the music boxes and record boxes made in Switzerland, will be discussed.

Visiting the exhibition is combined with guided tours during which the historical music automatons are put into operation. Individual rooms (workshop hall, Salon Bleu, dance hall) can only be visited as part of these tours.

The museum's previous special exhibitions have been dedicated to the following topics:

  • Musique de gare - station machines in Switzerland
  • Jewels of Time
  • Daydreams with music - figure automatons
  • What's the time? Homage to the Swiss German watchmaking art
  • When the sound was still coming out of the funnel - phonographs and gramophones
  • Sound art - pioneering time, heyday and fall of Swiss music boxes
  • Music in time - clocks with mechanical musical mechanisms
  • As if by magic - the organ's console. On the history of the Welte company on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Welte Philharmonic organ
  • The zither - an instrument of house, art and folk music
  • The Golden Age of the Jukebox - Music from machines
  • Charlie and friends - a homage to Franz Oehrlein
  • The last romantic? Max Reger and the Welte Philharmonic Organ (2016)
  • Stella, Gloria and Edelweiss - brass plate music from Switzerland (2016/2017)

The planned next special exhibitions are:

  • Claude Debussy "live" - ​​recordings by the French composer on the Welte Mignon piano (March 25 to May 21, 2018)
  • Ringing gold - fantastic masterpieces from the collection of the Museum of Music Automatons (May 31, 2018 to January 31, 2019)

The Britannic organ

The organ intended for the top landing of the great staircase in 1st class of the Britannic

The philharmonic organ built by M. Welte & Söhne in Freiburg im Breisgau for the HMHS Britannic around 1913 forms the centerpiece of the exhibition with around 1500 original piano rolls.

Because of the renovation work, the philharmonic organ, which had been in the museum's possession for 30 years, had to be dismantled and stored. In the course of the restoration of this organ in 2007, inscriptions such as "BRITANIK REGISTER" were discovered in nine places.

According to research by the museum, the organ was originally intended for the HMHS Britannic (a sister ship of the legendary RMS Titanic ), was probably installed in 1914 and later removed because the Britannic was drafted for the First World War .

The original piano rolls are currently (2012) being digitized and revised together with the Bern University of Applied Sciences for Technology and Computer Science . Today the organ can not only be operated with the fragile paper rolls, but can also be controlled directly by computer.

Web links

Commons : Museum for Music Automatons, Seewen  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

swell

  1. ^ Britannic organ . Museum of Music Automatons. Archived from the original on August 17, 2009. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved June 7, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bundesmuseen.ch
  2. ↑ Christoph E. Hänggi, David Rumsey: The origin of the Seewener Welte Philharmonic organ. (PDF; 3.6 MB)

Coordinates: 47 ° 26 '25 "  N , 7 ° 39' 43"  E ; CH1903:  six hundred and sixteen thousand eight hundred forty-six  /  254411