This Sunday, February 8, marks the presentation of the fifty-seventh Grammy Awards. Although the ceremony is taking place in Los Angeles this year, here in New York, displayed among the treasures housed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, are instruments once played by famous and influential musicians who have received or were nominated for Grammys during their careers.

Read More

Today the Department of Musical Instruments celebrates its storied history with the launch of A Harmonious Ensemble: Musical Instruments at the Metropolitan Museum, 1884–2014—a comprehensive account of the people, performances, and instruments that have made the department what it is today. This digital publication includes audio and video material dating back to the 1940s, many images of the instruments and the people who have shaped the collection, and original documents never before seen by the public. It is intended as a resource for those interested in the department and its activities, and will also be available, without media files, in a searchable, printable format at a later date.

Read More

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is full of visual arts depicting people making music. These images of musicians can tell us much about musical life in the past, but what exactly was the experience of contemporary viewers when they saw these works? Certainly, familiarity with the instruments depicted would have evoked music in their minds. A modern example might be the use of a guitar in an ad for blue jeans and its ability to bring to mind a favorite rock anthem or country ballad.

Read More

It is well known that the Department of Musical Instruments benefitted in its early years from the work of one unusual nineteenth-century woman, Mary Elizabeth Adams Brown, who remains the largest donor in the department's history. Less well known, however, are the contributions of another important American woman collector of the time, Brown's near-contemporary, Sarah Sagehorn Frishmuth.

Read More

The name Sax is usually connected to Adolphe Sax, the man who achieved immortality with the creation of the saxophone, an instrument he invented around 1840 and patented in 1846. An outstanding and rare example of an ivory clarinet in the Met's collection, however, draws our attention to Charles Joseph Sax, Adolphe's father.

Read More

This week marks the celebration of Thanksgiving in the United States, and one of the popular hymns that will be used in religious services marking the date is the hymn "Nun danket alle Got," or "Now Thank We All Our God." The words to this hymn were written around 1636 by the Lutheran minister Martin Rinkart (1586–1649) and set to the tune known as the "Leuthen Chorale," attributed to Johann Crüger and written around 1647. The melody was later set by Johann Sebastian Bach in several of his cantatas and by Felix Mendelssohn in his Second Symphony.

Read More

In honor of the bicentenary of the birth of instrument maker Adolphe Sax, the Department of Musical Instruments has opened Celebrating Sax: Instruments and Innovation in gallery 682 of The André Mertens Galleries for Musical Instruments. This new exhibition features some astounding instruments by the maker and his family, and traces the influence he had on other builders of musical instruments.

Read More

November 6 marks the two-hundredth birthday of Adolphe Sax (1814–1894), and the Met will be celebrating the occasion with a special exhibition, Celebrating Sax: Instruments and Innovation, which features instruments made by three generations of the Sax family. Rare saxophones, brass instruments, and even an exquisite ivory clarinet are among the twenty-six instruments selected to showcase the inventions and innovations of this extraordinary family. The exhibition opens with a free concert by internationally acclaimed saxophone soloist Paul Cohen at 2:30 pm this Wednesday, November 5, in The André Mertens Galleries for Musical Instruments.

Read More

In honor of the 125th anniversary of the first gift of musical instruments to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Thomas J. Watson Library recently digitized the complete set of catalogues of the Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments. These catalogues, dating from 1888 through 1915, document the remarkable growth of this collection during its early years at the Met—growth which was almost entirely a result of the keen eye, strong social ties, and generous patronage of Mary Elizabeth Adams Brown.

Read More