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The Royal College of Music was
founded in 1882 by George Grove, who compiled the famous 'Dictionary
of Music'.
Since 1894 the Royal College
of Music has been housed in this Gothic palace created by
Sir Arthur Blomfield. Famous ex-pupils include the English
composers Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
The Museum of Musical Instruments
is only open one afternoon a week in term time,but worth a
visit as it has more than 600 instruments from the 15th century
to the present day and from many parts of the world.
The museum shows mainly instruments
of Western classical music, and some of the instruments on
display were played by composers like Handel, Haydn and Holst.
There is a smaller section of around 100 objects devoted
to instruments from Africa and East and South Asia.
The ground floor has Western
instruments where the sound is produced by the player's breath,
and mainly English keyboard instruments. The instruments
are arranged according to their place in the Western orchestra. In
the gallery is a 'clavicytherium', produced in South Germany
in around 1480, the earliest known surviving stringed keyboard
instrument, early forerunner of the modern piano.
A collection of non-Western instruments
and and Western stringed instruments, including a beautiful
English 'division' viol, 1692, and a collection of tiny 18th
century ''violins' known as pochettes.
The Royal College of Music stages
chamber concerts every weekday during termtime, around 13:00,
at the college and at various churches.
There are master-classes and
larger evening performances.
These concerts are mostly free
and open to the public.
Admission charge
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London
High St Kensington
