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An elderly man in London found wax cylinders to be played on a phonograph dating from the early 1900s which recorded his ancestors singing round the piano and on one there are church bells welcoming in the New Year- the past is brought to life- eerie in a way but also charming. It is amazing to hear real life sounds and people from a time long gone- what changes we have seen since then!


Here's the piano:


http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/Co...ID=object-773071&start=23&rows=1


Here's the article:


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-1902-discovered-grandfathers-attic.html

Sounds like a corduroy road.

What's a corduroy road?

I think it is cool.

Glad you like it ChopinAddict. I am fascinated by history and antiques- add this to it beiong a recording of a piano and well it's a winner for me!
What grabs me is that this pianist back in 1902 playing in her home with her family could never have even imagined that in the future people would be listening to her playing, and on machines called computers of which she could never have even forseen their existence!

I am fascinated by antiques too. I love antiques shops and would stay there for hours! I also love old photos.

Same here! I love antiques and vintage items. I have a 1930s gramophone and got a 1967 dial telephone the other day. It works! I love its bell ringer and dialling it. My modern phone is so boring- just keeping that if I have to ring a call centre and press one press two (yawn...)
I've also got a 1940s ticking wind up alarm clock- its bells are so LOUD!!!

Last month I bought a watch in the 70s style, although it is new.
Ah, I would LOVE to have a gramophone! Maybe I should buy one.
Oh, I also have a passion for old ads! Here are some old music ads for example.

Is it a wind up watch? Do you collect old magazines then? My Grandad had a pile of old 1940s and 1950s magazines on his sofa and when he passed on in the early 1980s my Dad let me have them. I read them all- ads included- the letters pages were interesting too. A woman in the early 1950s wrote how she invited Laurel and Hardy for tea and they came!
The magazines fell to bits so my Mum binned them sadly.
My Grandad ( Dad's Dad) was born in 1899!!!
His house was like a museum- stopped in the 1930s- he had a coal fire and no TV, refused a TV and a gas fire and had loads of broken old clocks, a bellow organ, old radios, piles of books and postcards. The most modern thing he had was a transistor radio my Dad bought him in the 1960s until my Dad got him a cassette recorder.
I'm sure Grandad influenced my love of vintage and antiques.I have his father's old Victorian inkwell.
The gramophone was left for me from an American friend who moved back to Arizona. It's a graphonola, British one.Has no horn. I need to buy it some needles.

Actually I think I am the only one in my family who has a passion for vintage, and it actually started relatively recently. I entered an antiques shop to look for vintage sheet music and was sooo fascinated by that they had.
I do have a collection of vintage children's stories which I found in a box labelled "free" in front of a second-hand shop. It has very nice illustrations!

Nice! Can you play any of it? Children's vintage books are very sweet.

My Mum loves antiques and some of the vintage things take her back to her youth so she likes them.
I love my 1967 telephone- I ring her on it!

The children's vintage books don't have any music...
The vintage sheet music is cool, but so fragile I am afraid of using it because it crumbles, so I put all the vintage sheet music in a special container.
I do have a Mendelssohn book (hardcover) with 1900 handwritten on the first page, and I LOVE it. It is a complete collection of Mendelssohn's piano works in VERY good condition considering its age. And it stays perfectly open when I play! Some new books are so annoying because they don't stay open. I paid 8 dollars for it, a good price I think.

The Mendelssohn book was a good price I reckon! I got an amazing music book dating from 1933 called Magic of Melody. It is about music and poetry and lyrics. It features composers and the author wrote lyrics to them eg Beethoven..Chopin.. it is so charming and talks about gramophone records and music versus music with lyrics. It also talks about poets and how they composed poems listen ing to people play music. I got this book for 10 pence!!! I found it on ebay for £30 so it is a collector's rare book; I knew as soon as I saw it in the 10 p box at a second hand bookstore it was a gem.

I also got a Victorian cookery book in that 10 p box!

Wow, great bargains!
I once found (as I already mentioned at PW) "Playing the Piano for Pleasure" for just 3 dollars. When I bought it, I didn't even know it is so rare and that it was such a bargain.
Once I also saw "Forbidden Childhood" by Ruth Slenczynska for just under 80 dollars. It usually costs more than 200 dollars because it is very rare, but I still didn't buy it because it was still a bit expensive (they have it at the National Library, so I can borrow it from there).
I once also found a very old folio where the first page was missing and I drove many crazy here to find out the composer because nobody seemed to have ever seen that piece.

Too much pedal.

And bad microphone placement.

Terrible recording - the pianist should get a teacher!

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(kidding of course)

(this is obviously very cool!)

With lack of other sorts of entertainment we enjoy today, I assume music was the sort of high-end glue that kept people entertained, and together, and happy back then.

100 years later it seems everyone's face is buried into their phone oblivious to what is going on around them.

This is why I like having my acoustic upright in our house - music fills the air, mistakes and all, for everyone to hear.

I love it!

that was very cool - next stop... we travel back in time and listen to chopin play

As an almost elderly only child, I'm longingly fascinated by the family feeling and camaraderie evidenced by the recordings in these wax cylinders. We seem to have lost so much. (I heard one of the Christmas ones played on NPR today.)

Wouldn't that be nice!!!!

I have just found this...

And this...