The Sound of Music

Friday, Saori took the day off and I was off for Recession Friday, so we hit the town after sleepy morning of bacon and eggs. It's been a few months since we last got a Jamba Juice, so we grabbed some drinks and headed to Scottsdale. There's something about Jamba that makes it feel like a public pool. There's the lightly chlorinated smell, the smell of plastic and bare concrete floors and bright colors, and calisthenics, and the people there are all getting grass shots and boosters like we've returned to the days of sanitariums.

Anyway, we went searching for the Musical Instrument Museum, a new, ambitious institution built on the edge of Scottsdale just south of the 101 off Tatum. The building feels massive- large volumes clad in sandstone, with a central spline (curvy linear shape) clad in copper panels. As far as I can tell, the museum was the brainchild of none other than the CEO of Target, and Target bore the majority of the funding for the endeavor, as well as providing their architect who designed the museum. However, apart from one large logo on the donor wall, the museum attempts to keep itself relatively non-commercial. (although there are special exhibits which blur to advertisements for Steinway, Sennheiser, and Fender among others). The place is big, clean, and cold, so bring something long sleeved if you go.

Thousands of instruments, grouped according to nationality, with video screens for each country playing loops of clips of various musical works. When you enter, you are given headphones and an audioguide type clip on. However, the audioguide is automatic- whenever you approach a screen with a musical performance on it, the player fades in the soundtrack to that player, so there's no fiddling or punching in numbers, which is kind of a "why didn't museums do this sooner" kind of feature.

All the countries of the world kind of wash over you after awhile, even if not all the countries have videos and even if you don't stop for all the videos. I got kind of numb to it all after about two hours. It would have been nice to have some kind of interlude built into the gallery setting. The other thing is that many countries don't necessarily have a national musical tradition, or share musical traditions with the neighboring nations. I'm thinking of the display for Monaco and Lichtenstein, both of which are essentially city-sized countries, where they showed almost token German brass or French strings.

After visiting the country galleries, we wandered downstairs to some more popular exhibits, a gallery of musical paraphernalia owned by various musical stars. One of John Lennon's pianos upon which he composed "Imagine", a few Carlos Santana guitars, a drum from the Beijing Olympics opening,  Jake Shimabukuro's ukelele, and various instruments owned by Bob Dylan, etc.

By far, the highlight of the museum was the "experience" gallery. This was a largish room lined with musical instruments meant for the public to touch and play. There was a theremin in the corner, guitars, tons of drums and xylophones from around the world, harps, rattles, taiko drums, an 8' metal gong ( "Please only one hit per guest" ). It was a lot of noisy fun. Best to experience on a slow day so there are fewer people making noise. The small guitars were impressive in how they were built very cheaply and ruggedly with very soft strings, but still managed to give a convincing sound when played. For me, it was almost worth the $15 admission to just play around in there.

I talked briefly to the two supervisors watching the room and commented that they probably needed to stock serious amounts of painkillers. They told me that today was really not bad, the worst was when a load of 20 elementary students came in, each apparently after the goal of making the most noise possible. Fortunately, they only have to work four hour shifts.