Musical Instruments Museum, Musical instrument collection in Mont des Arts, Belgium
The Musical Instruments Museum sits in an Art Nouveau building at Mont des Arts and displays over 8,000 instruments from different periods and regions across four exhibition floors. The collection spans from European stringed instruments to African drums and Asian wind instruments.
The museum was founded in 1877 to show early instruments to students at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, starting with collections from King Leopold II. It grew into one of Europe's major musical instrument museums.
The museum's name comes from its collection, begun in 1877 with about a hundred Indian instruments given to King Leopold II by Raja Sourindro Mohun Tagore and the Fétis collection. Visitors receive infrared headphones to listen to nearly 300 musical extracts while viewing the instruments.
The museum occupies the former Old England store at 2, rue Montagne de la Cour/Hofberg, on the Mont des Arts next to the Place Royale and opposite the Magritte Museum. Mechanical instruments fill the basement, traditional ones the ground floor, orchestral instruments the first floor, and keyboard and stringed instruments the second. Infrared headphones let visitors hear extracts of the instruments on display.
The museum holds the only surviving copy of the luthéal, a keyboard attachment that alters piano timbre, used by Maurice Ravel. Its collection also includes instruments invented by Adolphe Sax, the Brussels-based inventor of the saxophone, and a set of giant Chinese stone chimes.
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