When you work in a museum, there's no such thing as a dead object.
Especially not when it comes to musical instruments, even the most precious and priceless examples that live most of their lives under lock and key in climate-controlled vaults. And the chance to bring some of them out into the light is an event.
A quartet of stringed instruments made by Australia's preeminent violin maker Arthur Edward Smith are going to be played for the first time in decades in a one-off performance by musicians from the Canberra Symphony Orchestra at the National Museum of Australia.
The two violins, a viola and a cello - last played by the legendary David Pereira in 2008 - were made by Smith during his "golden period" of the 1940s and 50s, and made their way into the National Historical Collection just before his death in 1978.
For Jennifer Brian, a musician who works as a conservator at the National Museum, these instruments have just been sleeping.
Sometimes, they need to be "woken from their slumber" and played.
"They aren't incapable of being played - they just haven't been played in a long time," she says. "We're really just bringing them back to themselves, allowing them to shine again, rather than bringing them back from the dead or anything like that."
She says the Smith pieces are known for their resonance; bringing them out of the "great big dorm room" of storage and playing them helps them open up.
British-born Smith trained as an engineer but switched to musical instruments and eventually made his way to Australia, where he set up shop in Sydney in the 1910s.
He soon established a reputation for repairing and selling quality instruments, and several of the world's most famous musicians, including Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern would visit his workshop. He made around 170 violins, 40 violas and three cellos in his career.
The versions in the quartet belonged to various owners until there were brought together by his daughter Ruth and her husband Ernest Llewellyn, and later purchased by the Australian government in 1978. Llewellyn was director of the Canberra School of Music; Llewellyn Hall is named after him.
Canberra Symphony Orchestra violinist Pip Thompson trained here in Canberra, and says the chance to play a Smith violin doesn't come around very often.
She says the difference between the version she will play and her own antique French instrument is striking.
"Some instruments - and I would actually count my own instrument among these - they're great instruments, and it is possible to get a really good sound and a really good result from them, but it's quite difficult," she says.
"I think the Smith instruments, by and large, are easier to play, it's easier to get that result technically than a lot of other instruments which might achieve a similar result.
"They are all also very unique and individual, and certainly when we were planning how the concert would work, we tried the two violins ... to work out which one would have a timbre that was most appropriate for each player. It was a sort of a matchmaking exercise in and of itself."
She and her fellow CSO musicians have been playing the instruments in the past few weeks to "wake them up" and build up their original resonant sounds.
Brian says the rehearsals and final concert is one of the best ways people can engage with them as objects.
"By playing this quartet we can preserve their sound as well as their intangible meanings with our audiences," she says.
"Looking at a musical instrument sitting in silence is like looking at a ballet dancer standing still. You can imagine their movement, but you are not transported into the world of ballet.
"Allowing these instruments to sing again and recording those sounds, alongside the musicians' experiences of playing them, gives us a much richer understanding of just what makes these instruments so extraordinary."
- Resonances: Performing the AE Smith Collection, Gandel Atrium, National Museum of Australia, October 9, 6-7.30pm. Bookings essential: nma.gov.au
