The Growth of a Musician.

As a day for photography, forget it, but there was an interesting afternoon.

This month's U3A open meeting was a talk by John Sampson about his interest in music.
His opening gambit was to walk out of the shadows, pick up a silver post horn from a rack of about eight brass/silver wind instruments and play the "Post Horn Gallop," after which, he went to each of the twenty two instruments he had there, in turn, talked about it and played it. Each had a history, a sentimental value and, in many cases, an antique value. Several of them were four or five hundred years old. I took several photographs but, due to the low light level and the crowded room, none of them were up to scratch; this is the best of the bunch.

He discussed, at length, the problems of maintaining a musical museum under the watchful eye of his wife who worried about the increasing amount of house-space being occupied. I can empathise with him as I have a similar problem with my somewhat smaller collection of cycles.
As an aside, I used to know a London cycle courier, Stan Spelling, who sadly died nearly forty years ago; he owned two adjoining semi-detached houses, the one next door was full of his trikes. I never met his wife to hear her take on the situation.

The nearest instrument in the blip is a Renaissance cornett (not a typo) dating from the sixteenth century (See Wikipedia for more details).
That next to it is a Chinese gourd flute (or hulusi, click here for more details) and has one side pipe that acts as a drone (c.f. the bagpipes), while a second exists purely for visual balance.

You will appreciate that, having heard about so many musical instruments in the course of an hour, the salient features of most of them are now entirely forgotten. The lasting impression was that John could pick any one from this large range and perform on it straight away even though the ensemble required a variety of techniques.