In the opening chapter of his seminal work The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, Thomas Richards sums up the single idea at the centre of the 1851 Great Exhibition's conception: ‘that all human life and cultural endeavour could be fully represented by exhibiting manufactured articles’. This exhibition – this ‘first outburst of the phantasmagoria of commodity culture’ – would significantly change how the Victorian public understood material culture in ways that still resonate today. The Great Exhibition, while not the first exhibition of manufactured objects in Europe, was by far the most influential, and the systems of representation it established were perpetuated in the events of later decades. The idea of spectacle and phantasmagoria was central to the display of objects at 1851 and later, as the vast spaces and overwhelming number of products dazzled consumers into losing sight of the commercial nature of the goods they were invited to inspect. The presence of the arts at these exhibitions helped establish this grander narrative and, it was hoped, averted the descent of such events into ‘mere’ trade fairs. In combining the arts, manufacturing, and entertainment, exhibitions left attendees with a sense of ‘kaleidoscopic synthesis’, that the universe had been systematically ordered in such a way that arbitrary commercial decisions might be reconciled with grander ideas of art and learning.

As large-scale displays of material culture, international exhibitions could easily accommodate most raw materials, commercially manufactured commodities, and visual art-objects into their grand structures of display. In most cases, the buildings’ layouts transitioned seamlessly from machinery halls, to courts of commercial goods, to picture and sculpture galleries. Yet as we have seen, representing ‘music’ in this context was not so simple. Despite critics’ protestations, displays of physical, musical instruments were the most consistent representation of ‘music’ that the exhibitions held. These objects, like all those around them, were both ‘spectacularised’ as commodities and subsumed into the phantasmagoria of the exhibition spaces, but that did not mean that they were not also encountered as individual objects, loaded with their own cultural meaning. The idea of a ‘musical commodity’ – as one might classify an instrument – was something that bridged a gap between manufactured object and work of art. It was itself manufactured, but also facilitated the production of music. This position raised philosophical problems for the systems of taxonomy on which exhibitions relied to classify their contents.