The Curiosity Cabinet

1. curiosity cabinet (noun): 15th-century piece of furniture, typically made of wood, used to display a collection of artifacts. Said artifacts, which would be placed delicately on the cabinet’s shelves, were often thematically related to the collector’s profession. A scientist, for example, might exhibit remnants of botanical life or various medical anomalies, while a hunter’s cabinet would feature petrified butterflies or animal teeth. Curiosity cabinets were often the only place for laity to glimpse exotic pieces of fossilized wildlife, like the tip of a rhino horn or the claw from a hawk. These cabinets—and the collections they housed— are often considered to be predecessors of modern museums, and they have influenced various contemporary organizations such as the grotesque Mütter Museum of medical oddities, Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum, and the NYC-based new music ensemble the Curiosity Cabinet (see definition 2).

2. Curiosity Cabinet (proper noun): a chamber music collective whose drawers filled are with the musical curiosities and skills of instrumentalists and singers, each as unique as any wildlife oddity (see definition 1). Founded in 2009 by baroness of creativity Whitney George, the Curiosity Cabinet’s interdisciplinary programming champions new works by living composers, featuring performances that invite participation in an immersive drama of sounds, images, and gestures. The Cabinet seeks always to offer its audiences opportunities to indulge in the radical pleasures of spectacle, in the fun of looking as well as listening, and in the disorientating effects of satirical subversion.