Puccini’s Music Box

Editor’s Note: W. Anthony Sheppard’s solution of a “musicological mystery many decades old”–a Swiss music box that plays Chinese tunes heard in Turandot and Madama Butterfly–made the headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. Sheppard says he stumbled onto it, but as the great musicologist Oliver Strunk was fond of saying, “you have to be in the haystack to find the needle.” Sheppard’s big June 2012 piece for the New York Times is linked below. He teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts and is editor of the Journal of the American Musicological Society.
          Read the New York Times piece HERE.
          See the video from State of the Arts [New Jersey] and the Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ: