Museum rediscovers its antique instruments

Musical instruments might not seem like a subject for Volcano Seven, but its the circumstances in which they were found that I find intriguing. How can a collection of anything be forgotten in a museum?

Well, that's the thing with museums. They display 10% of their collection, the rest of it is stored underground or wherever their storage facilities are, and never see the light of day. And if their administrative folks aren't competent, who knows where items will end up.

From The Columbus Dispatch: Museum rediscovers its antique instruments

CINCINNATI — The recent rediscovery of a collection of more than 800 antique musical
instruments, stored beneath the Cincinnati Art Museum and largely forgotten for decades, has caught the attention of curators in some of the nation’s top museums.

The items span four centuries and represent more than 20 countries, making the collection important in the eyes of museum officials and instrument specialists, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported yesterday.

The instruments include African drums, a Burmese crocodile zither, a Chinese version of a hammered dulcimer and a native American ceremonial rattle.

“You don’t find these things in many places,” said J. Kenneth Moore, curator in charge of the musical-instruments department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “You just find them in a handful of places.”

Aaron Betsky, director of the Cincinnati museum, said the instruments, like other collections, had not been given due attention because there wasn’t enough room for them at the museum, which put off a planned expansion and has laid off workers.

Conservators plan to clean dozens of the instruments to use in an exhibition to go along with the 2012 World Choir Games next summer in Cincinnati. Some of the pieces might then be integrated into the museum’s collection but likely won’t be displayed in a dedicated gallery.

“This is really about instruments from around the world,” Betsky said. “And it was collected for the visual intensity of the pieces, not necessarily for their functionality.”

Many of the pieces came from wealthy Cincinnati industrialist William Howard Doane, who collected instruments as he traveled around the world. He started lending them to the Cincinnati museum in 1887, a couple of years before the Metropolitan Museum of Art began its instrument collection, and he ended up donating about 650, the newspaper reported.