Musical Instrument Museum

Last week I took time off from teaching, composing, practicing and even (gasp!) listening to music.  It was time to take a spring break and see some baseball spring training in Arizona and hike through the beautiful red rocks of Sedona.

Hence, no blogging about music.  However, on our last day, we ended up at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix.  Wow!  What an amazing new museum.  We spent about 2 1/2 hours there, and I'm sure we didn't see everything, and by the end I was so overwhelmed with the offerings that I was basically just walking through the galleries to make sure I hadn't missed anything too terribly important.

I stopped taking photos after 85 shots.

The top floor has instruments from around the world grouped by continent, then country (or sometimes region).  With headphones and a little transmitter, you could listen to various videos throughout the hall from each country - what a wealth of sound!  Also, you wouldn't believe all the variations on a theme - multiple kinds of drums, violins, things you bang on, things you blow into, etc.

I wondered how I could take anything from this experience to share with my students, and I ran across a sign in the China section about instrument classification.  It got  me to thinking about the various ways in which we have grouped instruments, from the modern Western thought of strings / winds / percussion to the Orff classification of metals / woods / skins, and then there are the ways in which instruments are played.  Perhaps I can put together a lesson with some of the photos that I took and have kids create their own classification system.