Grace Friary

ELLEN SNYDER-GRENIER ’80 ENJOYS building suspense. Slowly pulling on a pair of white cotton curator’s gloves, she faces her audience, inhales deeply, and says, “Are you ready?”

She pushes a button and the familiar sound of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” fills the room. This surprise symphony is performed by a mechanical orchestra of flutes, violins, trombones, piccolos, and clarinets embedded inside an elaborately painted
c. 1910 carousel organ. It is one of 700 music boxes and automata composing the Guinness Collection, bequeathed in 2003 to the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey. Snyder-Grenier is the collection’s curator.

“I guess you could say that we curators—or keepers, as the English call us—demystify objects. We do research and stage exhibitions to give artifacts voices, allowing them to tell their stories to the public. We are really detectives.”

As an undergraduate at UMass Amherst, Ellen concentrated in Early American literature, American folklore, and studio art. She received her curatorial training in the master’s degree program jointly sponsored by the Winterthur Museum and the University of Delaware.

Collected by the late Murtogh Guinness, heir to the Irish brewery fortune, this assemblage of rare musical objects is the only one of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. Dating from the late 16th to the early 20th centuries and once filling twin town houses in New York City, the collection enchanted Guinness’s family and friends for decades.

Next time you reach for your iPod, imagine living in a world where music was rarely heard. “In the 21st century, we are literally drowning in music,” says Snyder-Grenier. “But in the 18th and early 19th centuries, most music was live, performed at the opera, in chamber concerts, or in symphonies, offering cultural experiences only for the wealthy. Some people lived nearly an entire lifetime rarely hearing music. It wasn’t until 1820 that inexpensive music boxes were available for household use.”

The author of the award-winning book Brooklyn! An Illustrated History (Temple University Press, 1996), Snyder-Grenier has received numerous national awards for the exhibitions she staged as deputy director of the New Jersey Historical Society and as chief curator of the Brooklyn Historical Society. But exhibiting the Guinness Collection, she says, is the biggest and most exciting challenge of her professional career.

Hear For Yourself:
“Musical Machines and Living Dolls: Mechanical Musical Instruments and Automata from the Murtogh D. Guinness Collection” is on permanent display at the Morris Museum, 6 Normandy Heights Rd., Morristown, New Jersey; 973-971-3700.
www.morrismuseum.org

More pieces from the collection:

	Sublima Corona Style 32 disc music box, c. 1899 Made by German immigrants in the late 19th century, these disc music boxes replaced more expensive cylinder boxes and made it much less expensive to listen to music. The sad ending to the story is that the Sublima Corona could not compete with the more popular phonograph, and by the 1920s the Regina Company abandoned music boxes and turned to making vacuum cleaners.
	Orchestrophone fairground organ, c. 1910 With 108 pipes and cymbal, snare, and base drums, this organ—crafted as a fixture on an early 20th-century carousel—has a full and luxurious sound.
	Euphonia organette, c. 1885 Snyder-Grenier likes organettes “for their democratic virtue.” They were much less expensive than cylinder music boxes. People could hear jigs, reels, hornpipes, and waltzes when they pleased.
	Encore Automatic Banjo, c. 1901 Playing everything from cakewalks to ragtime, the Encore was called the Greatest Mechanical Marvel of the Century in a period advertisement. Found in cafés and amusement arcades in the late-19th century, it exposed ordinary people to new musical sounds.
	Cylinder music box, c. 1850s Beautiful in its simplicity but revolutionary in design, cylinder music boxes grew out of technology developed by highly skilled French and Swiss watchmakers. By the 1820s, those who could afford them were bringing shortened versions of the music on the Oregon Trail and airs from European courts into their homes.