Musical instruments collection at the Victoria and Albert museum set to close

It has been reported that the Victoria and Albert museum's impressive horde of musical instruments, many of which date back hundreds of years, is to be dispersed in order to make extra room for the institute's expanding display of fashion and costume holdings.

A number of the instruments will remain on display but will be made components of other collections - for example, the Venetian virgils that belonged to Queen Elizabeth I will be placed in the Medieval and Renaissance galleries.

Numerous other items will be distributed among other museums and collections around the UK - with a generous proportion going to the Horniman museum in Forest Hill, south London, which already has an estimable collection of historical instruments.

Sadly, many of the collection's pieces will be placed in storage, and only available for viewing on request.

It seems an odd move for a museum that has long been proud of its musical instrument collection - and, indeed, that describes the collection on its own website as containing 'some of the most beautiful instruments to be found in any public collection in the world'.

The horde, which has taken more than one hundred years to put together, is not only of great historical value; it also provides great aesthetic pleasure, filled as it is with eccentric and elegant pieces from the miniature to the gargantuan.

As the V&A website itself points out, the collection is not only enjoyable and informative for music lovers - it is also an outstanding resource for furniture or crafts historians, as most of the items on display are lavishly and extravagantly decorated and/or carved.

The many weird and wonderful creations on show include a jewelled spinet studded with 1,928 precious and semi-precious gemstones made by Annibale Rossi in 1577, a huge double bass that was played by the virtuoso Domenico Dragonetti (1763-1846) and an ivory oboe and tortoiseshell-covered recorder, both of which belonged to Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868).

While it is a relief to hear that many of the instruments will remain visible elsewhere in the museum or be loaned out to new homes, it is a loss deeply felt by many that this glorious collection of oddities, which sheds so much light on the history of not just music but our culture as a whole, will no longer be able to be appreciated in its entirity.

www.vam.ac.uk

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