Worlds of Music

More often than not, a museum has a dignified but rather dusty aura: precious old instruments lie dormant in glass showcases and if you're lucky, a tour guide might carefully nudge the keys of an antique cembalo for you.

But Mannheim's new Bassermannhaus, a small museum for music and art that is part of the city's "Reiss-Engelhorn" museums (rem), proves that a museum can be anything but staid.

A singing, breathing whistle

"This is an exhibition of music and not of musical instruments," curator Michael Tellenbach told Deutsche Welle. The beautifully presented instruments are only the accompaniment.

This is how it works: at the entrance, visitors get an audio guide – which, in itself, isn’t special or surprising. But the Bassermannhaus curators have come up with a special twist. Standing in front of an instrument, you suddenly hear a three-thousand year old whistle from Central America as it sings and breathes or the sound of a particular viola d'amore that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is said to have heard when visiting the court at Mannheim.

Music historians played and recorded each of the 200 instruments from three millennia on display. Short texts and sound samples from classical and ethnic music, rock and pop tell an exciting story of the relationship between mankind and music.

Royal courts and the backstreets of New York

"God is a DJ" - these words welcome visitors as they enter the museum. And: "If you know the secret of sound, you know the secret of the universe." The exhibition splits the cosmos of a composed world into four parts: music as communication, as an element that fosters companionship, as a stimulant for activity and a means of achieving change, transformation and transcendence.

The show juxtaposes cultures and eras; music, for instance, as played in the mid-18th century at Mannheim’s Electoral Court compared and contrasted to courtly music from Japan and Africa. Visitors sway to the trance-like beat of exotic drums and the melee of sounds from the backstreets of New York’s poorer quarters alike.

Standing in front of a gong, the visitor to the Bassermannhaus Museum will hear not only the original instrument’s big bang, but also the first chords from Haydn’s oratorio "The Creation". Asian flutes that imitate chirping birds can be heard alongside passages from works by French composer Olivier Messiaen. The musical museum tour ends in the recording studio of a present-day modern jazz guitarist, where visitors can assemble their own soundtracks.

A memorial to the family

13 million euros ($16.9 million) flowed into a private foundation. The museum’s benefactress is Ellen Bassermann. The elderly pianist from a traditional Mannheim family is a music enthusiast and teaches music. As the last in her family to bear the Bassermann name, the museum is her 800 square meter monument to family tradition and her passion for music.

It’s a museum of music tailored to please the iPad generation – apart from the rather clunky audio guides. More fitting might be hi-tech touch screen gadgets, so people wouldn’t have to fumble with buttons in the dark.

The special show "Musical Worlds" is scheduled to run through September 2012 before it becomes part of the museum’s general exhibition – as it were, a "work in progress".

Author: Anastassia Boutsko (db)

Editor: Rick Fulker