Inspiration for the Modern Revolutionary
I put the 3-D glasses on as instructed and gaze into the screen as the image comes to life. A room, rotating slowly. There is the clank of metal as a door unlatches. Voices at the bottom of the stairs, then footsteps.
Brian Emery, Associate Professor of Photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology, might seem like an unlikely candidate to be conducting a study of the attic at the Robert Carter house. I tell him as much, and he agrees….
“They don’t make ‘em like they used to” is how the saying goes. In the case of some 19th-century German-made toys, that might be a good thing.
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If you’re visiting the Historic Area in early 2016, you can expect to see critical conservation and landscape maintenance work underway at two locations–in the Governor’s Palace formal gardens and along portions of Duke of Gloucester Street….
A new vodcast shows how the Paper Conservation Lab is protecting 1770s Virginia Gazettes.
You receive a copy of the first full printing of the Declaration of Independence in Virginia. It’s a true rarity. Only a handful of copies are known to still exist….
What’s that smell? If you’ve visited the newly erected Market House or Anderson’s Blacksmith Shop and Public Armoury, you may have noticed something in the air after the buildings were painted. The odor of chicory? A nearby BBQ? Believe it or not, it’s paint! Tar paint, to be exact. …
When a house in Colonial Williamsburg is repainted, who picks the hues? It may come as a surprise but the house itself does! If it is an original building with original painted material, then the historic evidence should be there. It is my job to find those nooks and crannies that contain early paints, and analyze that evidence in the Materials Analysis Laboratory.
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When I give tours of my analytical lab to our guests, everyone’s eyes seem to widen as I introduce them to the Fourier-Transform Infrared Microspectrometer (FTIR for short). It’s definitely a mouthful but it’s also a great friend to us materials analysts!
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A toe board looks like a solid board with slightly funnel-shaped holes for the pipes (see wind-chest diagram), but the boards are anything but solid. …
Most of us would look at a tiny paint flake as nothing more than a speck that should be swept into the garbage. But in the Materials Analysis Lab, that tiny paint flake contains a wealth of information to help us understand the history of an object….
Music Paper was used to prop the toe boards above the sliders to allow the sliders to move
By John Watson
Perhaps it seemed only natural that the original makers of the organ wind-chest chose old printed music to use as paper shims. The music paper was added to build up the thickness of the bearers so they would stand a single thickness of paper higher than the sliders, allowing the sliders to shift without binding under the toe boards (see wind-chest diagram).
I wondered whether the music could have been some old unsold stock from music merchants Longman & Broderip. L&B had recently gone out of business at the time James Longman, Muzio Clementi and their partners started Longman, Clementi & Co., producing this organized piano in their first year (1799).
Title page of Amphion Anglicus, the anthology of music published by John Blow in 1700. Colonial Williamsburg Special Collections
Dr. Nikos Pappas came through the lab last week and spotted the music paper glued to the wind-chest. Nikos, a musicologist here in Williamsburg for a research fellowship at our library, made a surprising observation. Nikos pointed out that the music was printed using movable type. That technology for printing music had been replaced by engraving early in the 18th century. The music paper was much earlier than I thought.
Taking into account that some of the paper fragments had page numbers up to 204, Nikos knew that very few books of music in that early period had so many pages. He had already spotted one of them in the special collections of Colonial Williamsburg’s John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library. It was Amphion Anglicus, an anthology of music composed and published by the celebrated early English composer John Blow in the year 1700.
The next day, I made an appointment to see our original copy of Amphion Anglicus. With a photograph of one of the paper shims bearing the page number 199, I asked Doug Mayo in the library’s Special Collections to turn to page 199.
Two of the paper shims from the wind-chest (darker) next to the corresponding pages in the original 1700 publication. Colonial Williamsburg Special Collections
Voila! It was a perfect match.
The workmen had cut up what was already a 99-year-old book of music, composed and published by John Blow one year after Blow’s appointment as composer to the Chapel Royal.
Today, of course, no one would think of cutting up a first edition of John Blow’s Amphion Anglicus. Undoubtedly, Blow is venerated among today’s early-music enthusiasts more than he was in 1799. Perhaps the paper was the right thickness for the shims. Or perhaps the organbuilder just had a sense of humor, putting “Blow” in the wind-chest.
In the next post, we’ll look take a major step in the restorative conservation of the wind-chest.
Conservation of the Tucker organized piano is made possible by a gift in memory of N. Beverley Tucker, Jr.