Mechanical Musical Instruments Exhibition

For the first time at Cremona Musica you can find a curious exhibition of mechanical instruments from the Amarcord Museum of Torricella del Pizzo

What are Mechanical Musical Instruments? They produce sound in which the sequence of notes is pre-programmed and derived from a control section, then passed to a soundboard—the musical instrument itself. The makers were in agreement and never confused the music performed with that played by their instruments. They believed that the purpose of mechanical music was not to imitate performers, but to create something more imaginative and rich, which, in its own way, evokes enjoyment and laughter. With the opening of the Museum, the second phase of work by the “Friends of Music” group of Torricella del Pizzo officially began. After the reconstruction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mechanical Drum, work began on the recovery and restoration of mechanical musical instruments. It is with this in mind that the collaboration with the AMMI (Associazione Musica Meccanica Italiana) is focused, with the primary aim of recovering and spreading M.M.. The exhibition offers a lively and curious repertoire of mechanical and automatic instruments, a reality that presents a historical sequence starting from Leonardo da Vinci (1495) and arriving at cylinder and melodic pianos (1930). The visitor, through a visual journey, has the opportunity to travel through history, gathering values ​​and emotions in a relationship of wonder and clamor. A collection of mechanical devices, which presents the entire historical journey with the possibility of listening to their melodies and experiencing their effects. Barrel organs, serinettes, carillons and music boxes, automatons and reed organs, shoulder and cylinder pianos, melodic pianos, automatic coin-operated pianos, orchestrions, piano machines (mechanical fingers), fairground organs, dictaphone machines, phonographs and gramophones. Alongside these large instruments, the exhibition includes smaller objects, linked to more intimate and familiar situations, such as music cassettes and photographic books with musical movements. There are also instruments built by our technicians for educational and research purposes. As part of the museum and AMMI’s ongoing research and study activities, which bring together and connect all the knowledge in Italy in this field, the exhibition focuses on local research.