The Cincinnati Art Museum recently discovered it had a long lost treasure trove of rare instruments in its possession. More than 800 antique instruments just sitting in storage…unused and pretty much forgotten.
Turns out the University of Michigan has three times as many historical instruments housed mostly off campus in a high-security vault. On today's podcast, we get a rare tour inside the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments.
http://traffic.libsyn.com/mrartpod/Artpod_080311.mp3
Steven Ball is director of the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments:
"This is the largest, most diverse and most important collection of musical instruments owned by any university in the world. It’s so remarkable it really almost defies words. There are instruments from every continent except Antarctica."
There are more than 2,400 instruments "from the extraordinary to the seemingly mundane," says Ball.
Want a visual? Check out this slideshow of some of the instruments featured in the audio tour. You can also access a searchable database of The Stearns Collection.
