The Marvellous, Magical, Musical Box

The hills are alive with the sound of mechanical music. In the season of big, live orchestras and operas, Dr Seán Williams opens up the story of the tiny music box: at turns curious, enchanting, and uncanny, a maddening but also a meaningful memory. This programme is not designed to wind you up. These inventions invite us to think. The supposedly trivial, tinkly tones of kitsch not only reproduce and commodify art, the music box is itself a musical instrument which has inspired authors and composers. And its mechanisms can be profoundly important for imagining, expressing, and remembering ourselves.

Starting his journey in the borderlands of Switzerland and Germany, where nineteenth-century music boxes were the creations of clock-makers, Seán realises that the real point lies much closer to home. And in us. He returns to see the collection of John Phillips, from the Musical Box Society of Great Britain, in rural Worcestershire. He hears from maestro of the music box, Philip Carli. Musicologist Professor W. Anthony Sheppard of Williams College in the US tells Seán that Puccini's operas sung to the tunes of music boxes. So Seán retrieves a recording from the BBC archives. He questions our assumptions about the aura of art, and translates excerpts from German literature by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Rilke. Seán listens to Grace Meadows, member of the British Association of Music Therapists, about the role of music boxes in dementia care. The story of musical automata is also one of human depth.

Produced by Mohini Patel.

The Reader is Tom Alban.

Art in an age of mechanical reproduction is a surprisingly inspirational, human story.

Curious, enchanting, uncanny, the music box is a maddening and a meaningful memory. Seán Williams invites us to think again about kitsch. He doesn't want to wind you up.