Mrs. Brown's Magnificent Obsession

IT began in the 1870s, when a young tourist named Mary Brown bought a little ivory lute in a shop in Florence. Aided by her indulgent husband, a New York banker, she went on to amass an incredibly diverse collection of no fewer than 3,390 musical instruments. By the time she died in 1918 at the age of 76, she had turned them over to Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the Met, alas, had no place to display them permanently; so they moldered in storage for more than half a century.

Now the Met has opened new exhibition galleries, and 800 items from one of the world's most impressive collections of musical instruments are on view at last. Many have been restored to playability. The Met plans to tape-record their sounds--"truthful witnesses of early musical culture," Curator Emanuel Winternitz calls them--and pipe them into headphones for visitors. To start a series of recitals in the museum's auditorium in which professional musicians will demonstrate the capacities of rare items in the collection, Pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski has already played the oldest piano in existence, a 1721 creation by the Florentine Bartolommeo Cristofori.

Among the other treasures: crystal flutes; a ceramic horn from Germany, painted with blue flowers and glazed; fish-shaped slit drums from Japan; 5-in.-long fiddles that 18th century dancing masters carried in their pockets; Indian randsringas, a form of trumpet (left); New Guinea bull-roarers (wood carvings designed to roar when swung over the head on a string); and walking sticks that unfold into violins for instant serenades.

Oddest of all is a set of Central African lyres like the one below. Instead of using the usual gourds, the resourceful Africans lopped off human heads, scooped out the contents and covered the tops with parchment and strings. They left a little hair around the ears for decoration.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.