At No. 3 Baoqing Road in Shanghai, the Garden House houses a "small but beautiful" museum, the Shanghai Symphony Museum. Since this is a cultural relics protection building in Xuhui District, since the trial operation in October 2017, the museum has adopted an online reservation system and strictly restricts the daily visitor flow, requiring "hard work" to make an appointment. Recently, with the official launch of the digital version, home can also experience VR panoramic roaming.
This is the first symphonic music museum in China, showing the development of Western symphonic music in China since the late 1870s. Built in the 1920s as the residence of Zhou Zongliang, the dye king of Shanghai Beach, the house now forms a music district with the adjacent Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Shangyin Opera House and Shanghai Conservatory of Music. The Digital Museum has made a lot of expansion on the existing exhibit content, and the content is richer.
A museum tucked away in a garden house
Enter the VR online museum, have a sense of immersion, you can follow the direction of the arrow, browse the museum's many precious documents and physical exhibits, including manuscripts, musical scores, musical instruments, records, books, letters, programs and so on. While understanding the history of the development of Shanghai symphonic music, you can also feel the unique charm of Shanghai Garden House in a brick, a stone, a flower and a tree.
The corridor on the first floor of the museum
As soon as you "enter the door", you can see a grand piano with a history of 100 years. It was the first concert grand piano in China, purchased in Europe in 1921 by Mei Bai, the conductor of the Shanghai Gongbu Bureau Orchestra, the predecessor of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. The organ served in the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra until 2014. Through the video, you can also see the restoration of this piano and the audition of the pianist Shea Twins, and listen to the sounds of a hundred years ago.
Pianos and records from a hundred years ago
Next to the piano is another important item in the museum's collection, the 1929 recording of the Spanish composer de Falla's "The Magician of Love", which may be the first recording of this work in the world, and almost certainly the earliest surviving symphony recording in China. The album was previously collected by the late scholar Xu Buzeng, who was donated to the museum by his son Xu Shen in 2020. Click on the audio, you can hear a 2 minutes and 15 seconds recording, babbling. Due to the limitations of early recording technology, the original soundtrack inevitably has noise, like traces of history.
Exhibition Hall of Shanghai Symphony Music Museum
The museum also houses the relics of composer Zhu Jian'er, an old piano that has accompanied him for sixty years. In July 2017, when he heard that the Shanghai Symphony Music Museum was to be built, 95-year-old Zhu Jian'er donated the piano and wrote in his own handwriting: "The old piano has accompanied me for sixty years, accompanied me in chasing the dream of symphony, and today it is dedicated to the museum, and the sound of the piano will always remain in my heart." Along with this old piano, Zhu Jian'er also donated the metronome he brought back when he studied in the Soviet Union. A month and a half after donating the piano, Zhu Jian'er passed away. Today, the old piano sits quietly in the museum, still covered with a dust cloth that has been washed a little yellow.
There is also a manuscript of Xiao Youmei's "Mourning March" composed in Germany at the end of 1916, and the baton used by conductor Huang Yijun when he went to Berlin to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1981... Generations of symphonic musicians have promoted Chinese symphony to the world stage and made their own voices heard.
Listen to precious recordings
The Shanghai Symphony Museum also has a "digital audiovisual room" where you can listen to the recordings of precious works in the history of Chinese symphony music, such as the third movement of Ding Shande's "Long March Symphony" recorded by The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra in 1962 by Huang Yijun, such as the violinist Yu Lina solo, and Chen Xieyang conducting the Violin Concerto "Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai" by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.
Start your immersive music journey by opening the following link: https://museum.shsymphony.com/