Beep! Blat!
That’s what I
sound like when I try to play a musical instrument.
I love listening
to classical violin, but the only noise I can make with a violin is by bouncing on the strings.
Butte and I are still trying to figure out the logistics of
playing this flute as a team … it’s tough
with short arms and short fingers!
This harmonica is more our size. Still, we’ve agreed that
we’re most adept at playing the iPod.
Do you play a musical instrument?
Whether you do or not, you’re guaranteed to have a blast at Phoenix,
Arizona’s Musical Instrument Museum.
The Musical Instrument Museum, or MIM, opened on April 24, 2010. It was founded by the retired Chief
Executive Officer of Target Corporation, Bob
Ulrich. Mr. Ulrich was inspired by a beautiful Musical Instruments Museum in
Brussels, Belgium. Phoenix is really lucky to have its own MIM now!
The MIM’s 17,650-square-metre building has nearly 7,500
square metres of exhibition space for thousands
of instruments from all over the world.
When you enter the MIM, you get a set of portable headphones
to wear. As you wander around the displays of musical instruments, your
headphones pick up samples of music from monitors scattered throughout every
gallery.
The galleries are set up by region: Africa, the Middle East,
Asia, Latin America, Oceania, Europe, the U.S., and Canada. You’ll see
everything from guitars to drums to keyboard instruments.
How do you like this instrument? It could be a fanciful
bear, but it’s called an O, and it’s
from Gyeonggi Province in South Korea.
Here’s another amazing instrument – believe it or not, this shaggy
thing is a set of bagpipes from Lithuania, a republic in northern Europe
on the shores of the Baltic Sea.
What nation do you
think of when you hear bagpipes?
I’ve always associated bagpipes with Scotland.
I heard the Great
Highland Bagpipe played by a kilted musician named Michael McClanathan at Scottsdale’s Westin Kierland Resort.
Mr. McClanathan’s bagpipes were made in 1880 in Edinburgh,
Scotland by a craftsman named Peter Henderson.
As Butte and I wandered around all the displays of
instruments at the MIM, we were amazed to learn that bagpipes are made and
played traditionally in all kinds of
different places.
They have all sorts of names, too, from the mizwad of Tunisia to the cornemuse
of France and parkapzuk of Armenia.
Bagpipes are really ancient instruments. They already
existed over three thousand years ago, in what is now the nation of Turkey.
Here is a set of bagpipes from modern-day Turkey, called the
tulum.
This is called a shuvyr,
and comes from the Ukraine.
In Hungary and Poland, they’re called duda.
The bagpipe is called gaida
in Bulgaria. Look how children are
playing it, too:
Here’s a set from Croatia,
a republic on Europe’s Adriatic Sea.
Notice how the bagpipe in this video uses a bellows to inflate the bag, instead of
the usual blowpipe:
Bagpipes look like they have a flute at one end; it’s called
the chanter. Flutes are incredibly
ancient. A bone flute found in the Hohle
Fels Cave in Germany has been
dated to at least 42,000 years ago.
Imagine, the mighty cave
bears of prehistory had to put up with humans doing their music practice!
Sheesh.
Well, that makes Butte and me feel a bit better about the
noise we’re making here …
Speaking of prehistory, we visited another wonderful museum in Phoenix: the Pueblo Grande Museum and Cultural Park. Its focus is on archaeology, and I’ll tell you more about it in my next post.
Story © S. Clouthier
Photo of cave bear courtesy Jan Dembowski/Wikipedia
Other photos © S. Clouthier and D. Wei
Videos courtesy carolineiraci, zecbaron08, Keijike, boyandobrev,
nemethmik
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