Outrage as V&A puts musical instruments into storage
15 January 2010, Andrew Stewart
Cittern, c1700, probably by Tielke HamburgV&A Images
The Victoria and Albert Museum is to place its public display of musical instruments into storage this spring as part of a planned redesign of the institution’s fashion galleries. The V&A’s permanent exhibition of musical instruments, presently housed alongside fashion in its Room 40, will be removed to make way for the extensive renovation as part of the museum’s ongoing Future Plan initiative.
A press spokesman told CM that Room 40 requires refurbishment. ‘The musical instrument collection will be removed in spring 2010 so that the gallery can be redesigned to show the fashion collections and related temporary displays over two floors,’ he said. ‘Although this will mean that there will be no gallery dedicated to musical instruments at the V&A, there are musical instruments on display in other contexts, such as the British galleries and the new Medieval and Renaissance galleries.’
The museum intends to display some of its musical instrument collection in the furniture gallery, set to open in 2012. The new Europe 1600-1800 galleries will also contain a selection of musical instruments when they open in 2014. ‘The V&A and the Horniman Museum are discussing the long term loan of significant objects from the V&A's collection of musical instruments to the Horniman Museum,’ the V&A’s spokesman added. ‘In the interim, the musical instrument collection will be accessible by appointment as part of the Museum's Study Collections at Blythe House, Kensington Olympia.’
Fine musical instruments have been collected by the V&A from its early years as a legacy of the 1851 Great Exhibition. Its first instrument acquisition, an 18th-century German theorbo bought for £8 in 1856, set benchmarks of craftsmanship and aesthetic quality that helped fashion the museum’s musical instrument collection into one of the finest in the world. The collection includes the earliest known dated English keyboard instrument, a claviorgan made in London in 1579; the so-called ‘Queen Elizabeth Virginals’; a natural horn once owned by the 19th-century virtuoso Giovanni Puzzi, and a harpsichord by Ruckers the Elder created in Antwerp in 1651.
Organologists, musicologists and students of decorative arts have all been attracted to explore the V&A’s holdings of art music and folk instruments. News of the intended closure triggered concern among members of the Comité International des Musées et Collections d'Instruments de Musique (CIMCIM). After the V&A’s plans were debated at CIMCIM’s international meeting in Florence last September, an open letter was sent to the museum’s directors jointly signed by senior curators of instrument collections worldwide and the Galpin Society, the long established British organisation for original research into the history, construction, development and use of musical instruments.
Galpin Society chairman Graham Wells, who wrote to V&A director Mark Jones to protest against the closure of Room 40, fears that the musical instrument collection will be cherry picked for future use at the museum before being diluted through loans to other institutions. ‘The reply I received to my letter was fairly perfunctory,’ he commented. ‘What really frustrates me is that Mark Jones has said that “the history of music and performance does not fall within the remit of the museum”. But musical instruments have been part of the museum’s collection since it moved to its South Kensington site in 1857. The present director doesn’t like musical instruments, but his illustrious predecessors had no trouble with them. I believe the plans for the collection is an unfortunate short-term thing, which will be appallingly damaging. Once the collection is broken up, it will never be put back together again.’
Mr
Wells admitted that the V&A’s existing display of musical instruments fell
short of ideal and deserved a thorough overhaul. He condemned the museum’s
plans for the collection, however, saying that its effective dismemberment
would be a ‘catastrophe’ for organologists and for the public alike. ‘I think
it is possibly the whim of the current director,’ Mr Wells suggested. ‘It seems
to be that if you have a lively curator or director [who supports the display
of musical instruments], you can achieve wonders.’ He cites Edinburgh
University’s collection of historical musical instruments, which manages to
display a large number of important instruments in a small space. ‘I would
prefer that the collection be given complete to another institution such as
Edinburgh. I find it hypocritical for Mark Jones to suggest that the
instruments do not belong in the V&A only for the museum to grab all the
best pieces to place in other V&A galleries. That’s two-faced, to say the
least.’
The curator of Oxford University’s Bate Collection of musical instruments, Andy Lamb, suggested to CM that the V&A’s decision to remove its current display of musical instruments was regrettable. ‘It is particularly wounding that in France, Germany, Belgium and most other countries the national collections are nurtured and developed while ours are put into storage,’ he said. ‘The directors of the V&A have made assurances that some items of the musical instrument collection will be incorporated into their permanent exhibitions, such as the British galleries. However, there is no suggestion that they are planning to develop any new displays in the near future so this sounds like a hollow promise.’
