In front of the Horniman Museum in the leafy Forest Hill district of London stands a weathered Tlingit totem pole. It is loomed over by the museum’s squat-yet-somehow-also-lofty clocktower and regarded from behind with neo-medieval solemnity by the knights, ladies and at least one naked supplicant pictured in the gauzy Arts and Crafts mural on the building’s façade. The eagle at the top of the totem pole peers just above a row of Spanish Bayonet trees that guard it from the busy London South Circular Road running directly in front of the museum and between the Horniman Play Park on the other side of the street. I tried to discern some message about the colonialism, in the bewildering mixture of signs, maybe something about the contest between the Spanish and British in the north Pacific.
Alaskan Nathan Jackson carved the totem pole for the museum in 1985 and crowned it with the eagle that serves as his family’s crest. The bird looks south, away from central London. Big Ben, a far more famous clocktower three times as high as the Horniman’s, rises three miles away to the northwest.
Made from cedar, the eagle also looks away from the kindred species from around the world to be encountered in the Horniman Gardens behind the museum. Out in front, though, the incongruous juxtaposition of arid-climate foliage and humid northern art reflects the museum’s founding mission, its anthropological bent to gather artefacts from around the world and across the expanse of human creativity —over which, a cynic might add, the sun never sets. A vigorous early advocate for the British welfare state, Frederick Horniman inherited his money from the family tea fortune.
Above the façade’s mural are big block letters in stone reading HORNIMAN FREE MUSEUM. The place was free when it opened in 1901 and still is. Children of London from across all classes should, Horniman ardently believed, be able to come and marvel at, even interact with, the holdings, seeking inspiration from the human-made objects while also experiencing the diversity of nature in the sixteen acres of gardens, arboretum and along the “animal walk” — no longer called a zoo.
A friend told me that what he most remembered about going to the Horniman on a school trip when he was about ten was biting into a nail in a morning bun he got at the cafeteria. A new extension opened in 2002 and is more welcoming of light and access than the hulking original structure. The clean and airy shop and café seem to promise that food safety standards have risen since the unwelcome mouthful.
But we hadn’t come to pet the alpacas. We were in search of keyboards and other musical instruments.
When a country goes about conquering and collecting from the world, and especially when that nation is housed on a relatively small island, there will eventually be storage issues.
In 2010 as part of ongoing renovations and reconfigurations, the Victoria and Albert Museum, just south of Hyde Park some four miles distant from the Horniman, closed the exhibition space that had long been dedicated to 250 musical instruments, among them many fascinating keyboards.
After this off-siting, only a couple of the most visually opulent virginals were retained in the popular British Galleries near the entrance to the V & A. The most spectacular of these was made by John Loosemore in 1655. Loosemore was also an organ builder, but during the Commonwealth the Puritans made war on the King of Instruments too. Loosemore therefore turned his considerable talents to domestic instruments and finished a lavish virginal whose case painting includes what is purported to be the first European depiction of an American wild turkey (on the fallboard, where you might imagine the player’s right thigh or knee to be when at the instrument).
The depictions of trees and beasts (both human and otherwise) would have been perfect for the Horniman, but this instrument was just too precious to be furloughed south of the River Thames to Forest Hill.
Having trekked all the way to the Horniman, we made are way inside and downstairs through the gleeful kids and their minders and to the musical instrument gallery. The space is long and narrow like a submarine, which makes a certain sense since it was directly above the aquarium—another kid-friendly attraction.
After a tight left turn around the entrance door one is greeted by an late 18th-century chamber organ and a plaque that describes, if quickly, the complex technological that makes its unique sound. The King (or, as the German-speaking Mozart, had it “Queen”) was getting its due as the first order of business, though the musical monarch had been exiled to a bunker in South London.
More keyboard glories followed down the long case: objects in polished mahogany, others adorned with intricate marquetry or keyed in ivory and covered in ebony and rosewood, on down to the far end and the warplane parts repurposed by Harold Rhodes for his electric pianos initially designed to use in music therapy for recovering World War II soldier.
Across the narrow aisle, in the long glass display facing the keyboards and bisecting the gallery lengthwise were stringed and bowed instruments, drums and shakers of ever size and stripe (literally) from Asian, Africa, Americas and Europe.
Making the turn at the far end of the space and heading back towards the distant exit, I examined through the glass early 20th century drum kits made, as the labels were determined to point out, with materials sourced from around the globe. Throughout the exhibition kinship and exploitation were paired leitmotivs.
A niche was carved out among the shawms and oboes and flutes for a pair of harps, including one played by Marie-Antoinette, but now absent since it had been recalled to the V&A.
A couple of small children had joined us. Their mother checked her phone at the far end of the submarine. I was seated at one of the sound tables that tries, futilely, to make-up for the resounding paradox that all these musical instruments are imprisoned in silence. In a museum dedicated to play, these could not be.
I had summoned a recording of a glass harmonica played by my friend and colleague Dennis James. The little girl hopped onto the bench beside me and slapped at the buttons and suddenly an Mbira shoved aside Dennis’s Mozart and then, with another press of the button, we heard the absent harp. “Why don’t we listen to one thing?” I suggested, but the girl wanted to play her way was having none of it. I knew the feeling: there’s just too much of everything in a place like this.
I strolled past the horns and trumpets with their fabulously complex plumbing (“no. 754: Cornet: 2 Stölzel Valves, 2 shanks, 2 crooks — A.G. Guichard, Paris, c. 1840”) …
… and neared again the door out the gallery and the final display cases. Here was a huge BBB-flat Tuba nicknamed “the gilded monster bass.” It was taller than I was and would have been too much even for André the Giant to wrestle with. Birds were painted on the wall just behind it flying out of the bell, as if dislodged by a blast it could never make while remanded to its cell of silence.
This lonely behemoth (the tuba not André) stood next to a case of conches. The point of this juxtaposition seemed to be that Nature produced wind instruments requiring no human intervention, could, as the tuba demonstrated, lead to absurd results. There were many, still graver implications about technology and truth.
Next to the shells were three stuffed songbirds (the European robin, the European goldfinch, and the European bee-eater) confined to glass cubicles fitted out with some scraps of their natural habitats. The inferences to be made—and heard, though not in this place—were many, among them that the repertoire of the bee-eater is more beautiful than that of a triple low B-flat tuba.
A man sat on low stool by the birds, sketching them. I watched him work for a time, until I could hear the scrape of his pencil on the paper.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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