Collection From One Man’s Love of Music

Instruments that have provided harmony for martial airs and minuets are on display at Claremont Colleges’ Fiske Museum in a collection that began with a young man’s love of music.

Curtis William Janssen, who was born in 1896, played the cornet as a boy and later studied music at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. During World War I, he enlisted in the Navy as a musician. While serving in Europe, Janssen acquired a German bugle, which was the beginning of his collection of musical instruments. It is on view together with 552 others he gathered during his lifetime. Subsequent donations have added another 100 instruments to the collection that is one of the largest in the United States.

“The instruments we have span several centuries,” said Patrick J. Rogers, the museum’s director. “They range from the Baroque to the present.”

Tibetan Temple Trumpets

On display are 18th-Century violas and a Neopolitan mandolin of the same period. There are three intricately decorated Tibetan temple trumpets, ethnic instruments from Africa and Asia, Polynesian drums, and bells from throughout the world. A lute with its half-pear-shaped body is a romantic relic. It was the most popular musical instrument of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance in Europe and England.

In a more military vein are bugles carried during the Civil War by trumpeters who sounded the calls from reveille to taps, and a brass drum from a Union Army regimental band.

Rogers pointed out one of the most unusual items in the museum: “It’s a harmonicon,” he said. “Basically, it’s a number of glass goblets mounted on a board. One rubs the rims of the glasses creating a melody. This one was manufactured around 1831, and there are but a few in existence. A brochure that came with it states that it is so simple to operate, you can be playing tunes within a few days.”

“I would say that is a slightly exaggerated claim,” Rogers said. “But this is what makes our collection so interesting--instruments that are very unusual and were experimental. Here’s a violin that folds into a walking stick. Some of our instruments are so strange that we don’t know how to classify them. We try to keep as many as we can in playing condition and we’re restoring others.”

Sousa’s Band

After the war, Janssen met band director John Philip Sousa, who had been the leader of the U.S. Marine Band from 1880 until 1892 when he formed his own band and went on tour. Janssen became the youngest member of Sousa’s band in 1920, and spent a year with him touring Europe.

In the years that followed, Janssen continued his musical studies and also taught at a number of schools. From 1929 to 1946, he was a member of the music faculty at Ohio University at Athens. By this time he owned more than 500 instruments, which he displayed in several large rooms. He also introduced a course on the history of musical instruments, which he called Instrumentology.

Janssen’s early association with Sousa and teaching assignments at various schools is reflected in his choice of brass instruments--nearly 150 horns, including one bass trumpet which is more than seven feet long.

Janssen, who died in 1952, wanted his collection housed in a private college west of the Mississippi. It was acquired by Claremont Colleges in 1954 and is housed in the Kenneth G. Fiske Museum, on the lower level of Bridges Auditorium.

Hours are 2 to 4 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and 10 a.m. to noon Tuesdays and Thursdays, or by appointment. Admission is free. From the San Bernardino Freeway go north on Indian Hill Boulevard in Claremont 1 1/2 miles to 4th Street. Turn east on 4th Street and go four blocks to College Way. The auditorium is on the northeast corner of the intersection. Information: (714) 621-8031.