At most museums, exhibits usually sit silent while on display. But at one northwest lower Michigan museum, their collections actually bring musical education to life.
By showcasing playable, one of a kind antique instruments, children and adults alike are able to interact music history in a different kind of way.
WCMU's Tina Sawyer tunes us into the story.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Tina Sawyer: The quietest instruments at The Music House Museum in Williamston, north of Traverse City, are the phonographs, jukeboxes and old time radios that sit stoically in glass cases that line the halls. But, one large music box can be heard from the end of the hall with its whimsical song. Its a Regina Music Box and it's not tiny. Its thought to be the beginnings of the modern day jukebox and it plays tunes from thin but durable copper discs that look like big, floppy CD's.
Becky Gagnon: That instrument dates to 1897.
TS: That's one of the Music Museum's Becky Gagnon. She explains how the musical discs were made.
BG: There were engineers and mathematicians who knew music theory that tapped out a prototype and then from there they were hand stamped. And it was very labor intensive and expensive industry.
TS: Much like the care the music makers of years past put into making the instruments, staff members like Becky at the museum also place as much attention into keeping the music alive. She has been giving tours for over 10 years.
BG: I love it. Its a wonderful place to be and I learn something new everyday. I have a hope that many young children that are introduced to our museum will find an interest in this and continue to have friends and maybe someday their own family and children come to visit the museum.
TS: And many have since it's opening in the early 1980's. Since 1985, just over 450 thousand guests have marveled at the beauty and rich sound quality of the instruments, which are played almost every day. One of main attractions is the magnificent Amaryllis.
TS: The Mortier Amaryllis pipe organ was made in 1922, less than one hundred survive today and it still sounds like the day it debuted. Its melody resonates through your body as if touching your inner Mozart or Bach, encouraging those who experience it to swirl around the main room of the barn-shaped museum. Tim Keaton, who is the Executive Director of the Music House, says that's exactly why they are here.
Tim Keaton: It's a celebration of really humanities ingenuity and drive to create music in their homes, but it's really it's kind of more than that. It's it's, you know, really our drive to just have music in our lives. And so that's what brought everybody together and the original board and the board still remains to be populated by people who are church organists, music teachers, piano teachers but the connection is...we're all lifelong musicians.
TS: Tim further explains the motivation for musical education offered at the Music House for young people.
TK: We do educational programs, which is a big part of our mission because we do a spring program where we have three hundred different, 3rd through 5th grader kids come through and we have a gentleman, Tom Kauffman, who does a curriculum that teaches them about the science of sound. We either raise the money or support these kids coming through it. We do a thing in the fall where we have a young pair of amazing strings players, the Moxie Strings. They come in and they do workshops for middle school and high school strings players, which it's tough today because the public schools can't support music the way they could, and it's such a fundamental part of critical learning math skills, everything else. You know, it's part of our mission.
TS: But you're never too old to learn new things. In fact Tim schooled me on the difference between player pianos and reproducing pianos.
TK: Reproducing pianos captures the actual performance, and we have George Gershwin playing his own Rhapsody in blue. I listen to it two or three times a day every day and I. Never get sick of it. TS: But I asked Tim if the "kids" get sick of it..is it boring to them?
TK: A lot of people think museums as a thing where they go and see old things but you know this is about music which is old and new to us all the time. And to see young people...their eyes light up to this kind of stuff and its not old to them...its new to them.
TS: As echoes of the past harmonize within the walls with every note and every tour at the Music House Museum, almost every person, of any age, leaves with music alive in their hearts forever. I'm Tina Sawyer WCMU News.
