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The Shelves are Alive . . . with the Rounds of Music
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Glen Gurwit, a volunteer at the Musical Wonder House in Wiscasset, shows off a British-made phonograph player with a large, papier-mâché horn.
At top, he holds a black celluloid Edison cylinder and its tube, which depicts Thomas Edison's face. (Troy R. Bennett / The Times Record) |
By Seth Koenig, Times Record Staff
Published:
Friday, October 30, 2009 2:06 PM EDT
WISCASSET - On the shelves and in the drawers, on display and out of sight around Wiscasset's Musical Wonder House are cylinder records. Thousands of them, mixed up and out of sorts. Some are valuable, some are not, but all are windows to a bygone era of recorded sound.As the Musical Wonder House finishes its season Saturday, the museum's staff and supporters look forward to a busy winter of sprucing up items in a vast collection of music boxes and gadgets. The place is known for miles around for its elaborate wind-up musical cufflinks, shoe brushes, footstools, teapots, cigarette dispensers, snow globes, paintings and more.
The age-old craft of restoring antique tune carriers may have some computer-based company in this off-season's work load, though: creating a database that catalogs the venue's enormous and scattered collection of cylinder records.
Longtime Musical Wonder House visitor and volunteer Glen Gurwit is an expert on the cylinders, which predated disc-shaped records and were developed in the late 1800's for use in Thomas Edison's Phonograph machine or another subsequent imitation.
Gurwit spent the past week sizing up the seemingly endless task of sorting through the museum's cylinders in anticipation of an effort to organize the collection with an online database.
Cylinders were matched with appropriate canisters, which were matched with the correct lids. The old records came from various sources, as people who'd discovered them in attics or garages over the years would offer to donate or sell cartons full of the musical antiquities to the Wiscasset collectors.
"You can't get this stuff from a book," Gurwit said. "You have to be doing it for years. Is it made out of brown wax or black wax or celluloid? Is it foreign or domestic? Is it vocal or instrumental? Does it play for two minutes or four minutes? Is it something very special or something very average?
"There are thousands of them around here, they're all over the place," he continued. "You can open up any drawer in the house and find them. Which ones are worth $5 and which ones are worth $500? There may be some here worth $1,000, but this isn't a money hunt. This is a way of seeing what they have and taking inventory."
Gurwit, who lives in Vermont and is a retired customs inspector on the U.S.-Canadian border south of Montreal, has been visiting the Musical Wonder House since 1969.
The longtime historian of recorded music talked about the old cylinders and their players in a way contemporary listeners might relate to.
"People have always valued entertainment," he said. "At one time, almost every household had a piano or an organ or violin. By the 1920's, most families had some kind of a phonograph, the same way we all have computers and cell phones now."
The phonograph and similar machines fell out of favor at the end of the Roaring '20's, as the onset of the Great Depression left many Americans unable to afford new cylinder records to play. Free music and news soon began to be broadcast over the airwaves, and old gadgets like those that populate the rooms of the Musical Wonder House became obsolete.
"Everybody wanted to find a way to get a piece of (recorded music sales), to figure out what people would want and afford, from talking machines to whistlers," Gurwit said, accompanying a small tour led by Musical Wonder House co-trustee Joseph Villani. "Sometimes they dispensed candy or had dancing dolls in them. Sales just ballooned, but then came radio, which was the end of almost all of this."
The Musical Wonder House stands at 16-18 High St. in Wiscasset and is open from Memorial Day weekend to Halloween each year. The museum will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. Go online to www.musicalwonderhouse.com or call 882-7163 for more information.
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