The Czech Museum of Music in Prague

[NOTE: You can click on any of these images for a larger version of the photograph.]

Across the street and down half a block from our apartment here in Prague is the Czech Museum of Music. The building itself is a former church that was deconsecrated in 1783 and has since been everything from a post office to a police barracks. The museum is surprisingly fun and interesting. First of all, I like the building itself, which doesn't really stand out all that much among all the historic buildings here in Mala Strana, but has a striking cupola (or maybe it should be called a clerestory). Once inside the building, you see an enclosed staircase that reminds me of an MC Escher drawing:
The museum's collection of instruments is nicely presented, and each room contains headphone sets on which you can listen to the instruments on display nearby. These include a wide variety of historic and unusual instruments. We enjoyed listening to a composition played on this old synthesizer:
Also of interest are the sediphones, made by Josef Sediva and popular with Russian military bands in the early twentieth century:
There are also two glass harmonicas:
And this beautiful fairground organ:
The evening of June 20 was Prague Museum Night -- a long twilit evening when all the museum admissions were free. As I already mentioned, the Museum of Music is very close to our apartment, so we got there to hear some fanfares played at the very beginning of the evening and then went to hear a recitation of some text by Durrenmatt accompanied by a jazz group called Nocni Optika at around 10:30. Because the days are so long here near solstice there was still a little light in the sky when we went to hear that performance.

Prague is of course known for the music of Dvorak and Smetana and for being the place where Mozart's Don Giovanni was first performed. There are many classical music performances each week, but I don't ever go to them because I don't usually listen to anything but jazz. However a few weeks ago the Museum of Music presented a concert by cellist Jiri Barta who played two pieces by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu. After dinner we just walked across the street to hear the concert, and I enjoyed both the music and the surroundings.

From posters at the Museum of Music we learned that there is a Museum of Mechanical Instruments in the town of Horovice, which is about forty miles outside of Prague. Last Saturday we went there by train and then walked to the Horovice Chateau which houses the collection. We enjoyed the grounds while we waited for the docents to come back from lunch. The chateau has been nicely restored:
The grounds are well maintained:
And the chateau itself is full of beautiful objects like this:
Then we were given a tour of the collection by a very pleasant young woman who showed us a variety of music boxes, pianolas and player pianos, musical pictures (paintings that play a melody like a music box does), gramophones and musical clocks. A few of the mechanical instruments are in good working order, and we enjoyed hearing their plaintive but surprisingly vibrant music. There was even a player piano that could be pedaled like a treadle sewing machine. Though I wasn't able to take pictures of that collection, here's a picture of the workings of an orchestrion from the Prague museum: