Collections
The college's museum of instruments, forming part of the centre for performance history, houses a collection of more than 800 instruments and accessories from circa 1480 to the present. Included in the collection is the world's oldest surviving keyboard instrument.
Owing partly to the vision of its founders, particularly Grove, the RCM holds significant research collections of material dating from the fifteenth century onwards. These include autographs such as Haydn's String Quartet Op. 64/1, Mozart's Piano Concerto K491 and Elgar's Cello Concerto. More extensive collections feature the music of Herbert Howells, Frank Bridge and Malcolm Arnold and film scores by Stanley Myers. Among more than 300 original portraits are John Cawse's 1826 painting of Weber (the last of the composer), Haydn by Thomas Hardy (1791) and Bartolommeo Nazari's painting of Farinelli at the height of his fame. A recent addition to the collection is a portrait of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke by Reginald Gray.
10,000 prints and photographs constitute the most substantial archive of images of musicians in the UK. The RCM's 600,000 concert programmes document concert life from 1730 to the present day.
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Famous quotes containing the word collections:
“Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)