A year to remember

The Museum of Music History (MOMH) began 2024 in an already strong position, with all its archives and objects securely stored and ready to be processed. We end 2024 having hired two new members of staff, recruited five new volunteers, and with a new temporary processing office in Haddenham to move this work forward. 2024 has been a fantastic year for MOMH: in September we celebrated our progress with a ‘relaunch’ event and we look forward to a range of events and exhibitions in 2025.

Storage and cataloguing

At the start of 2024 we had successfully removed our collections from the former home of our founder, Oliver Davies. Over the next two years it is our plan to process all our collections, that is, catalogue, conserve and properly store them in our museum-grade facility in Oxfordshire provided by Restore UK. This will have the additional benefits of reducing storage costs, and making access easier as everything will be in one place.

This work is already well underway, and as a member of the National Conservation Service, we have access to expert advice on conservation and preservation of documents. This has been invaluable as many of the documents in our collection have already been in storage for a long time, many in less than ideal conditions. By the end of our processing project all our holdings will be stored in archive quality materials in the climate-controlled Restore UK facility at Upper Heyford.

New staff and a new office base

In April 2024 we hired two new members of staff, both on a part-time basis: Dr Kate Kennedy became our General Manager, and Dr Alice Little our Curator. Each is specialised in music history and brings with them a wealth of experience in museums, music history, archiving projects, and also fundraising. Through our combined networks we have recruited five new volunteers who are supporting our cataloguing work and other tasks. As part of this expansion we are taking steps to ensure our museum policies are fit for the future, and have written new policies covering ethics, volunteers, and safeguarding.

In August we took a significant step forward with our plan to catalogue and store all our collections by taking on the lease of an office space in Haddenham, Oxfordshire. This provides us with a base where we can bring in boxes from our various storage facilities, process the documents (catalogue them, check them for conservation needs), and from which boxes can be transferred onwards to the storage facility at Upper Heyford. This also provides us with a professional space where volunteers can safely work, to host meetings with other museum professionals (we met with representatives of Britten-Pears Arts in November), and where researchers can access archives easily (we have already hosted two research visits since taking the office, both coincidentally by researchers from Columbia University, New York).

MOMH ‘relaunch’ event

In September, alongside the book launch of Kate Kennedy’s Cello: A Journey from Silence to Sound at the Wigmore Hall, MOMH hosted a reception to celebrate our progress and to set the stage for the future. At this event we held a pop-up exhibition of the Beatrice Harrison exhibition, featuring photographs, documents and clothing from periods of her life. We also launched our new Friends Scheme, which is intended to provide a forum for those interested in keeping up with MOMH’s progress through behind-the-scenes content, at the same time as raising regular funds for the Museum.

Projects

In addition to this fundamental work to preserve these music collections for the future, at the start of 2024 we committed to three new projects:

‘Virtually Haydn – the past, present and future of ensemble’ (exhibition in collaboration with the Augmented Reality Music Ensemble project at the University of Birmingham)
‘The woman who turned stained glass into music’ (an exhibition of the Mary Remnant Collection)
‘It’s a musical life’ (the development of a Musicians’ Oral History archive)

All of these projects are in progress, and we look forward to seeing them come to fruition at the start of 2025 – as follows:

Virtually Haydn – the past, present and future of ensemble

The aims of this project were to develop our collaborations with other musical organisations, to be part of twenty-first century musical research, and to engage with the public, giving them the opportunity to experience music in new ways. As part of this project, on 29 September, at our MOMH relaunch reception, we were delighted to showcase the research being conducted by ARME, the Augmented Reality Music Ensemble, an EPSRC-funded research project based at the University of Birmingham. We invited participants to sit in the second violin chair of a virtual string quartet and tap along to a Haydn quartet, receiving instant read-outs of how well they were following or leading the other members of the quartet. This partnership will continue into 2025, and in February we will host a public symposium, working jointly with ARME and also the University of Oxford, to explore the science and history of string quartet hierarchy.

The woman who turned stained glass into music

Mary was evacuated to a harpsichord maker at the age of 4, and was so inspired by the history and developments of instruments as a result that she travelled to at least eight countries including Afghanistan to research their instrument culture. Her books bringing together her knowledge of Western and world instruments are seminal, and pioneering not only because she was a woman academic, but because her work helped define the field of organology.

MOMH owns the Mary Remnant collection, which includes 150 instruments. The collection is currently in storage, and we are working with the custodian to ensure this archive is accessible and properly conserved. In 2024 our new General Manager Kate Kennedy was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 to present a programme on the Remnant Collection, to be broadcast in 2025. The documentary will tell Remnant’s story, and explore her collection in the company of an instrument maker, attempting to play some of her most significant instruments, such as the Sutton Hoo lyre and the harp created from an image in the Westminster Psalter.

One of the most pioneering elements of Remnant’s work was her inclusion of children in her lecture tours around the country. We are developing workshops for children in conjunction with the Chiltern Music Services, and with the diverse population of children attending Enfield Music Services to work with them to make their own instruments, inspired by Remnant’s collection. We are applying for funding from Arts Council England for our work in Enfield.

It’s a musical life

In collaboration with Wolfson College, University of Oxford, we have begun conducting interviews with older professional musicians to talk about their working lives. Our aim is for MOMH to hold an oral history archive about the music profession, which will be made accessible to the general public via our website. Interviews conducted so far include: pianist Dame Imogen Cooper, pianist/composer Sir Stephen Hough, composer Errollyn Wallen, composer Nicola Lefanu, and operative baritone Sir Thoman Allen.

Our next step with this project is to create a set of oral history interviews relating to twentieth-century British composition. Interviews will be conducted with composers Thomas Ades, Huw Watkins, Ryan Wigglesworth, Helen Grime, Cheryl Frances Hoad and Colin Matthews; the focus of the interviews will be the British landscape, and how it influenced major composers of the twentieth century such as Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, Ethel Smyth, Ellizabeth Maconchy, Herbert Howells, and Benjamin Britten.

As part of this project we are collaborating with Britten-Pears Arts to share oral history resources and recordings to enhance both collections and to avoid duplication.

Future plans

We are developing collaborations with musical organisations including ensembles, foundations and venues to offer MOMH as a home for their archives. This would mean professional storage and conservation of their archives in return for an endowment or annual fee. Benefits of this sort of arrangement would be to make these archives available to the research community, to other musicians, and preserve them for the future.

Our new website goes from strength to strength and we have used our News page, social media channels and mailing list to keep followers up to date and provide insight into our collections. Our programme of online exhibitions continues on a monthly basis, and we have received a number of enquiries from researchers, journalists and the general public about our collections and other musical topics. If we cannot ourselves answer these questions we can signpost people to where the information can be found. We intend to improve our offering in this area by developing a list of contacts for various musical subjects (experts on Beethoven or the Chinese erhu, for example), so that MOMH grows to be recognised as the first port of call for information relating to music history.

We have also been receiving regular enquiries about the use of scans of images in our archive for publication, and have developed a system of charging for these where we own the copyright. Our charges are based on the British Library’s charges, meaning they are affordable to the majority of researchers while also helping to raise funds for the Museum. We intend to create a new page on our website for these enquiries to streamline this process further.