Town exhibition explores 100 years of enjoying music

The newly developed Community Heritage Room at Tolson Museum in Huddersfield is nearing completion and will be opened later this month.

The brand new space – which received £50,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund – will be launched with its very first exhibition entitled Edison to Evile – a Century of Enjoying Music.

The exhibition explores how people around Huddersfield have been enjoying music for the past 100 years, whether by dancing, attending live performances or listening at home.

Cylinder record players, concert tickets and dancing costumes will help visitors recall some of their favourite music memories.

The exhibition features rare CDs and posters of Evile, the world-famous heavy metal band from Huddersfield, costumes from Huddersfield carnival and memorabilia from Huddersfield Choral Society.

Visitors will be able to hear 78 records bought locally in the 1930s and even listen to the earliest known recording of a human voice, made in 1860, as well as sampling the Messiah and Evile.

Curator Katina Bill said: “The early recordings are quite scratchy with a lot of surface noise, and really give a sense of hearing a voice from a long time ago. They are quite eerie as if there actually is a ghost in the machine - so different from today’s perfect digital recordings.”

Tolson’s Community Heritage Room opening is the culmination of almost a year of community activity involving a variety groups including pupils from Almondbury High School, the Pakistani Youth Forum and Wild About Wool.

The space has been the focus of volunteer activity in digitising recordings from the Kirklees Sound Archive which holds over 800 recordings.

Work has also been done to collate details of the objects in the Kirklees collection, many of which are on display at Tolson.

Tolson Museum is at Ravensknowle Park, Wakefield Road. The opening times are Monday to Friday from 11am to 5pm and Saturday and Sunday from 12 noon to 5pm

The exhibition Edison to Evile runs until September 11.