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See the Human Body Morph Into Musical Instruments From Around the World at a New Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Key takeaways
- Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent
- We find ourselves represented in these instruments because, for much of our history, music has been central to who we are and what we do.”
- Many of the roughly 130 works on display interrogate the music-body connection in their unique artistic forms.
Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent
Add as preferred source The Dance of Death, a 16th-century artwork by an anonymous German artist Metropolitan Museum of Art / Purchase, Harry G. Sperling Fund, James A. and Maria R. Warth Gift, in memory of Anne and Peter Warth, and Bequest of Clifford A. Furst, by exchange, 1996 A new exhibition that opened this week at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art puts 4,000 years of human music-making through an art history X-ray of sorts, scanning the anatomy of musical instruments for signs of humanity.
The new show, “Musical Bodies,” asks how and why so many instruments played through time and across the globe, from the hurdy-gurdy to the ehecachichtli Aztec “death whistle,” serve not just as tools of expression, but also as physical extensions and representations of the body.