Art Talk: Musical Instrument Museum

The Art Talk highlight this year is museums and today I am highlighting a fascinating museum in Phoenix Arizona. After hearing about this museum for many years I went and it was so cool!

The Musical Instrument Museum is so big! 200,000 square feet (60,960 square meters)! It has musical instruments from nearly 200 countries.

Note: The information about the instruments are taken from the pictures of the plaques next to the instruments in the museum.

Treasures, Legendary Musical Instruments

The first exhibit we went to is Treasures, Legendary Musical Instruments. I am not sure if it was my favorite because it was the first or because it had the coolest instruments. Here is a look at this special exhibit.


Baroque Guitar, Portugal, 1590	Violin, Italy, 1559	Harps, Central Africa, 1850-1875

I really appreciated that there were videos with artists playing some of the instruments in the collection.

"Patent Harp Guitar"
Pennsylvania, UAS, 1834-1838
Spruce, maple, ebony, ivory, mother of pearl

If you would also like to hear what the harp guitar sounds like his a video from the Musical Instrument museum page.

For those guitar and Jimmy Hendrix fans. Here is his Black Widow guitar, 1968

Guitars

We then moved to a all guitar exhibit. Wow there are some cool guitars!

Geographic Galleries

The first two exhibits were wonderful and took a bit of time to go through. It was nothing compared to the time to go through the galleries for different regions of the world. Wow you could spend days at this museum!