The Galpin Society

The American Musical Instrument Society

The Galpin Society warmly invites the American Musical Instrument Society to a joint meeting in August 2003. The event will include visits to 15 of the most important collections of musical instruments in the United Kingdom, 43 conference papers in which members of both societies will present the results of their recent research, concerts, and social events. The schedule will include all the regular attractions of the AMIS annual meetings - the business meeting, a reception, the banquet and auction.

Saturday August 2

Visit to Oxford. Much useful information about the University, Colleges, Museums and collections may be found on the University of Oxford website. This may help you to decide your priorities for the visit.

Travel to Oxford (there are frequent coach services from central London, Heathrow and Gatwick)

14:00 - 17:00 :: Conference Registration at Wadham College.

The accommodation reserved by the Conference administration in Wadham and Balliol Colleges, Oxford, is now fully booked: please make your own arrangements.

Evening :: dinner in local restaurants, followed by concert in Wadham College Chapel.

Sunday August 3

08:00 - 09:30 :: Breakfast in College. Those staying in Wadham College will be able to take a full English breakfast: a continental breakfast only will be available for those in Balliol College (Jowett Walk Buildings).

Morning :: Free time for morning choral service at Christ Church cathedral, or other denominational services; optional study visits; AMIS Board meeting. It is hoped that it will be possible during the day to visit the Holywell Music Room, the oldest Concert Room in Europe (1748), which stands in the grounds of Wadham College.

Morning only: study visit to the Bate Collection (instruments can be made available for study by prior arrangement: use the website) this visit is now fully booked.

All day :: Jeremy Montagu has kindly invited Conference participants to see his collection of woodwind, brass, strings and percussion, totalling some 2,500 instruments. This collection can also be visited in the afternoon of Saturday August 2, and on Monday August 4.

lunch (on your own)

13:45 :: walking tour of Oxford;

tea (on your own)

16:00 :: Papers session (Dennis Arnold Concert Room, Faculty of Music)

17:00 :: AMIS Business Meeting (Dennis Arnold Concert Room, Faculty of Music)

19:00 :: Reception in Wadham College gardens, hosted by the Galpin Society

19:45 :: Formal dinner in Wadham College. The evening will include the presentation of the AMIS Sachs and Bessaraboff Awards and the Galpin Society Baines Award. Booking for this dinner is now closed.

Monday August 4

09:00 :: Divide into groups for visits to Oxford collections. Transport between collections will be provided.

Morning and afternoon: the following collections will be available:

The Ashmolean Museum (Hill Music Room)
fine collection of early strings, plus Kirckman harpsichord and Adam Leversidge English virginal
Philip Bate's extended collection of wind instruments, and some very fine early keyboards
large and varied collection of 6,500 early and modern instruments (in two buildings).

lunch (on your own)

Late afternoon or early evening :: travel from Oxford to London (frequent bus service) Conference bus at 16:30 (first 98 applicants only).

Accommodation (three nights) in central London (College Hall, Malet Street and Connaught Hall, 41 Tavistock Square)

The accommodation reserved by the Conference administration in College and Connaught Halls, London, is now fully booked: please make your own arrangements.

Evening :: optional Organological Walking Tour of London

Weather permitting, Ben Hebbert will conduct an illustrated walking tour of the City of London and its surrounding area.

Following the history of the music trade through the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the tour is designed to describe the social and historical context in which many familiar instrument makers worked and lived. Areas of interest will include St Paul's Cathedral and the Royal Exchange, both areas of intense musical activity, and also the Inner Temple, home to John Playford and John Carr in the seventeenth century and largely untouched for almost three hundred years. Crossing the river into Southwark, sites will include Shakespeare's Rose Theatre before finishing with "warm beer" and food at the historic The George, close by the home of Jacob Rayman, England's celebrated "earliest" violin maker, and the only surviving Elizabethan galleried inn.

Tuesday August 5

Morning: visit to the Horniman Museum

AMIS and Galpin Society visitors to the Horniman Museum can tour the musical instrument gallery that opened in late 2002. A cross-section of the collection represented by 1,500 instruments will be displayed in a beautiful new space designed by RAA Associates. Included in the arrays will be historic instruments of European art music from the collections of Arnold Dolmetsch and Adam Carse. Recent fieldwork collections, made by the museum's curators, will be animated by their videos capturing performances within original cultural contexts. The exhibition will also celebrate the bi-centenary of the birth of the scientist Charles Wheatstone, inventor of the concertina, with a range of free-reed instruments, printed music and archival photographs from the Wayne collection which was purchased in 1996 with the generous assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Lunch :: at the Horniman Museum

Afternoon and evening: visit to Finchcocks including a demonstration/recital on the instruments in the Richard Burnett collection and an opportunity for keyboard players to try some of the instruments; supper in the cellar restaurant at Finchcocks (this excursion is now fully booked).

The Finchcocks Collection has been assembled over the past thirty five years by Richard Burnett, pianist and pioneer of the early piano revival in the UK. It comprises historical keyboard instruments, mainly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and numbers nearly a hundred instruments in all; these are housed in the Georgian manor of Finchcocks, a Grade 1 building set in a beautiful garden, surrounded by a Kentish landscape of parkland and hopgardens.

Highlights of the collection include the wonderfully preserved Guarracino virginals from 1668, a Portugese harpsichord by Antunes, Viennese fortepianos by Rosenberger and Graf, a tiny travelling square piano by Anton Walter, nine pianos by Clementi, and a magnificent house organ made in 1766 by John Byfield. There are also curiosities, such as the recently acquired Euphonicon, a pyramid upright grand from Prague, a "dog-kennel" piano by Mercier and many others. Many of the instruments are restored to concert condition, and these will be demonstrated during the visit.

Finchcocks is a musical centre of international repute and it presents a varied musical programme during the season, which runs from April to October. There is a September Festival, Open Days with music every Sunday, a lively educational programme, with concerts and courses for students and children; about fifty recordings have been made in the house. An ancillary collection of prints and pictures on the theme of the eighteenth century pleasure gardens is also on display.

Participants in the Finchcocks visit will have coach travel throughout the day, leaving from and returning to College Hall, Malet Street.

Wednesday August 6

Morning and early afternoon :: Visit to South Kensington. The following collections will be available:

Royal College of Music Museum of Instruments
The custom-built Museum, opened in 1970, houses an internationally renowned collection of 600 instruments (500 European, keyboard, stringed and wind; 100 Asian and African), including the clavicytherium, c 1480, believed to be the earliest surviving keyboard instrument. Gifts since the foundation of the College by the Prince of Wales in 1883 include collections from Tagore (1884), the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII (1886), Donaldson (1894), Hipkins (1911), Ridley (1968) and Hartley (1985). Since 1970 the Museum has become an important resource for education and research. A brief tour will be offered to enable visitors to hear some of the playable instruments.
The Victoria and Albert Museum
The collection, about 255 outstanding examples of Western art musical instruments dating from the 16th through the mid-nineteenth centuries, includes some 60 keyboards, 15 viols of various sizes, 5 violas d'amore, 7 violin-family instruments, a trumpet marine, 6 hurdy-gurdies, 16 lutes, 4 arch citterns, 2 round-back citterns; 15 guitars, 10 pedal harps, 9 recorders of various sizes dating from the 16th century, and other wind instruments.

Lunch :: at the Victoria and Albert Museum (included in conference fee)

14:15 :: All conference participants are invited to the Presentations being given at the CIMCIM meeting, see

16:00 :: travel to Hampstead

17:00 :: visit to Fenton House, home of the Benton Fletcher Collection of early keyboard instruments (first 40 applicants only: this visit is now fully booked).

Major George Henry Benton Fletcher (1866-1944) gave his collection of early keyboard instruments to the National Trust in 1934 on the understanding that the instruments be kept in playing order and accessible to musicians, scholars and students of early music. For the past fifty years, the instruments have been housed at Fenton House, a late 17th century merchant's residence bequeathed by its last private owner, Lady Binning, to the National Trust in 1952. The collection consists of 19 keyboard instruments: 8 harpsichords (late 16th century Italian; 1612 Ruckers, Antwerp with 18th century English ravalement; London-made: Burkat Shudi, 1761; Jacob Kirckman, 1752; do., 1762; Burkat Shudi & John Broadwood, 1770; Jacob & Abraham Kirckman, 1777; Longman & Broderip [Culliford], 1783); 4 virginals (Marcus Siculus, Palermo, 1540; Vincentius Pratensis, Italy, late 16th or early 17th century; Giovanni Celestini, Venice, late 16th or early 17th century; Robert Hatley, London, 1664); 2 spinets (England, Anon. second quarter of the 18th century, "John Hancock", second half of the 18th century); 2 English grand pianos ("Americus Backers", late 1770s; John Broadwood, 1805); 1 square piano (John Broadwood, 1774); 2 clavichords (German, late 17th or early 18th century; Arnold Dolmetsch, 1925).

Early evening :: Reception "At the Sign of the Serpent", 11 Pond Street, given by Tony Bingham

19:30 :: Dinner in Hampstead, sponsored by Tony Bingham (this dinner is now fully booked).

Thursday August 7

Visit to the Royal Academy of Music Gallery