Museum of Music: Part 1

Art is a very broad term. Art can be paintings, architecture, or upholstery. Artists can be sculptors, chefs, or auto detailers. Anything that is made or done can be made or done artfully and thus become art if the viewer and/or artist deem it so. The most widely practiced and well establish art forms such as literature, painting, sculpture, and music are often displayed in the largest and grandest buildings in cities around the world.

Any book you could hope to read can likely be found at your local library, free of charge, or bought used on Amazon for dirt cheap. Thanks to projects like Google Books, even out of print titles can be found online, for free no less. The greatest paintings, sculptures, and photographs from around the world are collected and periodically circulated in regional museums such as the Louvre, the MoMA, and the Getty. At even the largest museums, the entrance fee is either voluntary or waved on certain days, so as not to keep anyone from enjoying the collections. And if you're not near a museum, you can at least find a high-definition rendering for free with a simple search online.

But what about music? There are museums for physical artworks and libraries for books but there are very few public access centers for the enjoyment or history of music.

"Surely there is a National Museum of Music in the United States," you might say. And you'd be right. However, it consists of one 25k sq ft building located on the campus of the University of South Dakota. By comparison, the buildings of the National Gallery of Art occupy 25 acres of land on the National Mall.

Though it is nice that music has its own museum, the NMM actually almost exclusively deals with instruments.
And it's not alone. There is a small but significant number of museums for the history of instruments. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a permanent exhibit regarding the development and diversity of musical instruments that takes up about 2% of the Museum's exhibit space. Does that seem a little skewed in favor of other art forms to you?

The layout of the two main floors of the Met [gray areas are special exhibits].

Another form of music that is collected for the public is sheet music. The Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, has a collection of 22 million music items, including recordings, instruments, and sheet music.

But the most important demonstration of musical art is the music itself. As far as recordings alone are concerned, the LOC pales in comparison to the collections on iTunes or Amazon, who both claim around 13 million tracks, in contrast to the LOC's 3 million recordings. And those slim pickings available through the LOC are not available in any form online, so you're out of luck unless you live in the D.C. area.

Of course anyone may listen to music by going directly to the source and attending a concert. There are a number of reasons that this is an unsatisfactory way to learn about and experience music.

1. Price - To see a single opera will cost you a minimum of $25; to see an opera without using a small telescope to view the distant stage will cost well over $100, the best seats are many times that. Amusingly, tickets to see a popular musician in concert have nearly the same pay scale. Compare this to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Even if you pay the voluntary fee of $20, you gain access to tens of thousands of works of art for an entire day. $100 will get you the whole year including special exhibits and such. For the price of a 1-year membership at the Met, you could instead watch one concert from ok seats.
   
   I admit that there are always cheap to free local music acts or student concerts, but to observe the breadth of the most highly influential works of musical art, you'd need extravagant wealth.
   
2. Breadth of work -  Relatedly, to observe the breadth of musical art, you'd need more time than a working person has to spend. To adequately explore a museum takes days. To take in an equivalent amount of music via concerts would take months.
   
3. The dead are usually unavailable - Excluding tribute bands, it is rather hard to see the dead in concert.

A true Museum of Music would incorporate history, recordings, instruments, and performance blended together with modern technology into one unified experience. 

Stay tuned for part two of this post, where I will describe my ideas for creating a integrated Museum of Music.