[Untitled.]
The Musical Courier,
Vol 18 #8 February 20 1889, page 147.
The Metropolitan Museum of this city is a beneficiary of the well-known collection of musical instruments formed and owned by Mrs. John Crosby Brown. The collection, which numbers 266 pieces, is only rivaled by three others in America. The collection has been catalogued by Mrs. Brown's son, Wm. Adams Brown, and some idea of the scope of the collection may be gained from the catalogue, which tabulates instruments of Chinese, Japanese, Corean, Indian, Siamese, Burmese, Arabian, Syrian, Egyptian, Algerian, Persian, African, North and South American and European manufacture and use, as well as others from Palestine and Turkey. The collection is now at Mrs. Brown's residence in Orange Mountain, N. J., but will be removed to the museum within a few days. At a special meeting of the museum trustees, held yesterday afternoon at the house of Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Mrs. Brown's gift was accepted and an appropriate resolution of thanks was ordered to be prepared.
From the Sunday "Tribune."
The Musical Courier,
Vol 18 #10 March 6 1889, page 196.
It would, of course, be a pity to divide the collection of musical instruments which Mrs. John Crosby Brown has generously given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but its value for scientific purposes would be greater if it were brought into relation with the ethological specimens in the Museum of Natural History. The most valuable portion of it has a greater scientific than artistic value, which is just the reverse of the case with the instruments of the Drexel collection in the Metropolitan Museum.
The gathering of savage and mediaeval European instruments of music is an exceedingly sensible employment for collectors. The books are full of blunders, which owe their origin to faulty descriptions, and might have been avoided had opportunities for seeing the instruments of various periods in musical evolution been offered to the writers. There are some excellent collections in public museums in Europe, and specimens are yet to be found in out of the way places. Mr. M. Steinert, the New England dealer in pianos, purchased a number of early pianos in Germany last summer, and has several clavichords undergoing repairs at Stuttgart which he found in his native Bavarian village and surrounding places. Mr. Boekelmann, of this city, in order to illustrate some pictures on the history of the piano delivered at Miss Porter and Mrs. Dow's school in Farmington, where he is musical director, went to the trouble and expense of buying in Europe a clavichord and virginal, and seems to have had no great difficulty in finding them. How these instruments can be used in musical instruction is easily shown. If the splendid harpsichord owned by Mr. Knabe, of Baltimore, once the property of Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, one of the immortal signers of the Declaration of Independence, were put in first-class condition (which means little else than reparation of the plektra in the jacks) and were once used in a public performance of one of the clavier and violin sonatas of Bach, the musicians of New York would derive a better lesson in the old method of accompanying than can be given by volumes of description and analysis.
A story which Mr. Steinert tells in at once an illustration of the conservatism prevailing in the villages of Germany and an explanation of the reason why these old instruments are yet to be found there. Mr. Steinert, describing the music lessons which he took from an old Cantor in Bavaria 50 years ago, says that he was taught to play with his fingers straight out and not to use his thumb in scales, but only in full chords. Now, these rules were a part of piano technique before the time of Johann Sebastian Bach, who first gave independence to the hand. A relic of this fact was preserved in the name given by young Steinert's teacher to the position of the hand in playing the full chords which used the thumb. "That is the Bach Griff (The 'Bach position')" said the old Cantor.