Musical Stones of Skiddaw
Musical Stones of Skiddaw ( "Sound Stones of Skiddaw") is a superimposed four arranged rows of Lithophonen existing musical instrument from the first half of the 19th century, located in Keswick Museum and Art Gallery in Keswick in the county of Cumbria in the UK is. The sound stones were collected in the Lake District National Park in Northern England between the mountains Blencathra and Skiddaw , a few kilometers north of Keswick.
Construction
The slabs of Skiddaw's Klangsteinspiel are lined up like the keys of a piano . They lie elastically on two parallel, thick ropes in a wooden frame that serves as a resonance body . The lithophone has four playable sound levels and above the sound levels there are numerous singing bowls and some candle holders on a bar . The usual lithophones like xylophones (with wooden sound plates) and metallophones (with metal plates) only have one playable level. The stone slabs consist of a hornfels , a metamorphic hard rock. The sound stones of the two lower levels were edged with hand tools and on the two upper levels there are narrow, precisely calibrated sound stones, which may have been machined with machines. They are played with two spoon-like wooden mallets.
The musical instrument in Keswick, which was constructed between 1827 and 1840, is believed to be one of the oldest lithophones in Europe.
Peter Crosthwaite
An eccentric Peter Crosthwaite, born in 1735 , was initially employed by the East India Company and later became the captain of a gunboat he commanded against Malay pirates. He was also an inventor of everyday objects. He had these successfully made, but not patented, and then made copies of them available to the Keswick Museum. Crosthwaite was the founder of the Keswick Museum and was the first to make music with stones on a lithophone in Keswick.
He wrote his first connection between rock and music in his diary on June 11, 1785 when he found six musical stones that produced perfect tones. In each of these stones he engraved the corresponding note. He arranged the sound stones into an instrument and used it to create music in his house; but did not perform any music performances. The Crosthwaite instrument is on display in the Keswick Museum.
Joseph Richardson
Joseph Richardson, a stonemason born in 1790, was a gifted musician who played numerous instruments. The sound of the stones is an important test method with regard to quality for stonemasons before working on stone . You hit the raw stones with a piece of wood and recognize the quality by the sound. They call this method sound testing . Because of his profession and his connection to music, Richardson collected stones from his local area and found in 1827 that the stones of Mount Skiddaw reproduced sounds best. He experimented with stone thicknesses and stone lengths of the sound stones and after 13 years of stone search and testing, he finished the "stone" musical instrument. Richardson had three sons and they began to practice on this instrument and then performed with it at local concerts where they also played other musical instruments such as the violin, flute and other wind instruments. This style of music became known as far as London and they performed successfully there with pieces by Handel , Beethoven and Mozart, but also with other music such as waltz , polka , etc. This lithophone was gradually expanded to include singing bowls, bells , drums and other different percussion instruments. Richardson and his sons called themselves Richardson & Sons, Rock, Bell and Steel Band and played on February 23, 1848 at Buckingham Palace at the invitation of Queen Victoria . After more than 60 performances in London and England, the band went to France, Germany and Italy. Performances in America were planned, but when Richardson's youngest son died, these were canceled and the musical instrument was later transferred in 1917 by Richardson's descendants to the Keswick Museum, where it remains to this day.
additional
Daniel Till from Keswick played in 1881 with his two sons in the Till Family Rock Band with a lithophone he developed in London at the Crystal Palace and also in America at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Brian Dewan came from Brooklyn to the Keswick Museum in September 2005 and composed seven pieces on a lithophone. He then performed music on this stone instrument with Jamie Barnes for an hour during the Coniston Water Festival on September 18, 2005. There were other performances, for example on the occasion of the Liverpool Biennale in 2006 and in Liverpool Cathedral in September 2006.
The world-famous drummer Evelyn Glennie played on January 5, 2006 on a radio broadcast on the BBC under the title The World's First Rock Band on this lithophone. The title of the program referred to the Richardson family of musicians, who announced their music performances on posters under the title Rock Bands , because their instrument was made of rock , the English word for rock.
The Keswick Museum and Art Gallery is working with the University of Leeds on a three-year research project that includes: a. the aim is to find out why this Hornfels reproduces sounds particularly well.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Musical Stones of Skiddaw on allerdale.gov.uk ( Memento of the original from June 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Accessed June 20, 2010
- ↑ Notable pictures of the Till Family Rock Band on thesinginghand.blogspot.com . Retrieved June 20, 2010
- ↑ Program of the Coniston Water Festival from 2005 ( Memento of the original from August 10, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved June 20, 2010
- ^ World-Class Percussionist Rocks Keswick Museum. Evelyn Glennie plays Keswick'c Musical Stones for BBC. ( Memento from November 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
