“The First Piano Professors and Lost Music of Early New Orleans”

The exhibit “The First Piano Professors and Lost Music of Early New Orleans” is now on view at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. Co-curated by musician and archivist John Davis and the museum’s music curator David Kunian, the exhibit fills two big rooms with a story driven largely by sheet music. 

In the days before recorded sound, sheet music, mostly performed on home pianos, was the distribution system for popular music. New Orleans, and Canal Street especially, was a vortex of music publishers in the 19th century. The classical music they marketed, composed and performed by a mix of émigrés from Europe and Louisiana-born Creoles, was mostly lost to time. Excavated from various archives over decades by Davis, the music is resurrected in the exhibit. 

The first room introduces the musicians and the venues where they performed. The second room features the sheet music itself, both in glass cases and projected onto the walls. The soundtrack is by Davis, performing the works featured in the exhibit, which is a fascinating trip to New Orleans before the 20th-century breakthroughs of jazz and R&B. 

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