Museums - Musée des Instruments de Musique

Unlike many museums of its kind, the MIM has collections of both antique and contemporary Western instruments, as well as of instruments of non-European origin. The variety of its acquisitions stems from the museum’s founder, Victor Mahillon (1841–1924), who was the director of the largest musical instrument factory in Brussels in the nineteenth century, as well as being an acoustician and a collector. His curiosity and his flair for finding unusual pieces led to the formation of a large collection of “sonorous objects of primitive peoples,” as such objects were referred to at the time.
More recently, curator René de Maeyer (1969-1990) worked to expand the non-European collection, which now includes some 3,000 pieces—from Africa (850), the Far East (600), the Americas (500), North Africa and Islamic countries (350), Indonesia (275), India (225), and Oceania (130).
This wealth of objects is unfortunately only partly accessible to the public, and only some 150 non-European instruments are on permanent display. Objects selected for exhibition are those that the general public can relate to. They include African stringed instruments; talking drums from Africa, Mexico, and New Guinea; flutes and horns from Africa and India; Indonesian gamelans; zithers from various cultures; as well as Pre-Columbian, Mexican and Tibetan Buddhist instruments.