A sadly noted departure

Its 1,200 instruments from around the world include an 18th century Italian mandolin, unusual over-the-shoulder military brasses from the Civil War era, a gourd fiddle from Africa and a 9-foot-long temple trumpet from Tibet.

The museum had limited visiting hours at its home in the windowless basement of Bridges Auditorium for three decades, and then it closed altogether 16 months ago, partly because of a lack of upkeep funds.

Now, almost the entire batch -- harpsichords, pianos, clarinets, banjos and cymbals -- will leave its home in Claremont and be sold for an undisclosed price to a music museum being built in Arizona.

The move is triggering strong protests from some music faculty members, who say Claremont is losing a cultural treasure. But other officials are expressing relief that the collection will have a better-funded steward and a lot more public exposure at the new Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, an ambitious project financially backed by Robert Ulrich, chairman of Target Corp.

Barbara Jefferson, advancement director of the Claremont University Consortium (CUC), which owned the Fiske, described the sale as "a win-win situation." The consortium has no endowment to preserve or better display the instruments, and there was no "collective will" among the group's seven colleges to sustain it.

"This is a rare opportunity to keep the collection together. The stars just lined up for this," said Jefferson, who emphasized that Claremont wanted to avoid a piecemeal auction.

However, Robert Zappulla, a harpsichordist who is chairman of the music department at Claremont Graduate University, denounced the sale of what he described as "a jewel to be treasured and preserved." The move would deny the Southern California community access to the collection and end the arrangement under which Claremont students sometimes played the instruments in concerts, he said.

"To be honest, it's truly shocking to me that CUC is willing to sell off the collection -- period. Selling it to a private museum sends the outrageous message to the world that the Claremont Colleges just aren't willing to give the collection its due consideration, and to try in earnest to make it generally available for educational and research purposes -- our moral duty, really, as a prestigious institution of higher learning," Zappulla said.