What's in a name? I admit, “musical instrument
museum” did not inspire me. I pictured a dusty set of cabinets with tarnished
saxophones, even though a couple of well-traveled friends raved about the
place. How right they were!
I have mentally renamed the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) “The Amazing Museum of World Music” (the acronym isn't as clever but this place is so uplifting, illuminating and
inspiring to everyone, not just musicians, it deserves a name that should have
people flocking to it.
First, the building itself is elegant and
handsome. Second, visitors experience the best of technology with portable
headsets that automatically pick up
transmissions when they approach any of the hundreds of video/sound screens
that explain and demonstrate various musical styles etc. The exhibition rooms
of mechanical music machines and play-it-yourself instruments on the first
floor are just plain fun, and the “world of music” on the upper floor is
nothing short of fantastic. Talk about seductive! As you pass from area to
area, country to country, section to section, snatches of songs and sounds call
out to you to stop and examine the unique costumes, cultures, musical styles
and instruments from, say, Burkina Faso in Africa, or Latvia, or Israel ( the floor
is roughly divided by continents - the US has a room of it's own). Check out this YouTube video from MIM. The white-coated restorers are a little surreal, and this demonstrates only a minor part of their automated collection of tweeting birds, automatons and giant orchestral machines - a tiny part of everything you'll find here.
The variety
is astounding, the depth and breadth of research impressive. But most of all,
you will come away entertained, educated, enlightened, and yes, uplifted with
the knowledge that wherever a human lives on the the planet, we all speak the
language of music.AND you'll have a new appreciation of the beauty of all sorts of instruments. Tickets run from $10-20, and the museum is open most days, with specially scheduled concerts.
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