A walk through the new Musical Instrument Museum

“Every time I come up, I see something new,” Alan di Perna is saying. We’re looking at an musical instruments, an accordion- or harmonium-related construction, made of some gorgeously crafted wood.

There is no explanation of what precisely the instrument is yet, because the setting, the city’s new Musical Instrument Museum, is still under construction, and this particular spot—the “Free Reeds” section of the European Gallery—hasn’t yet been finished. But workmen are everywhere and that’s why di Perna—who as a longtime editor and writer at Guitar World, among other places, is an expert in his own right—is seeing new things every day.

The museum is a big affair, a structure of nearly 200,000 square feet on a 20-acre site in North Phoenix, on Tatum just south of the 101. It’s largely funded by Robert Ulrich, the retired longtime CEO of Target, now a Paradise Valley resident. It’s scheduled to open at the end of April.

Besides eight main galleries it boasts a swanky 299-seat theater in which is already booked a fairly sophisticated lineup of world music acts, meaning that the museum is going to be the latest live concert venue in the Valley as well.

Di Perna, who besides being a longtime music journalist is the author of a couple of books on guitars, moved to the Valley 11 years ago and took a position with the new operation recently.

He was kind enough to give PHXated an early walk through.

The structure has two floors, each united by a grand arcing corridor:

On the top floor are the museum’s raison d‘etre: Five spacious galleries, each devoted to a region: North America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Each gallery has a maze of regional or thematic enxhibits, most with instruments and a video screen. All visitors get headsets with the (somewhat steep) $15 admission; as you near each video screen, the sound automatically rises in your headsets and you can listen to the accompanying video, mostly of performances using the nearby instruments on display.

The North American gallery has a wide variety of elements, from displays devoted to (and funded by) instrument makers like Fender and Martin to various musical genres, everything from klezmer to hip hop.

The museum didn’t want photos of unfinished exhibits taken, but here are a couple of the completed ones I saw. This one, obviously, is the klezmer installation:

And here’s part of the polka one:

Downstairs are a few specialty galleries—one, of course, devoted to the guitar. That was undergoing heavy construction so we couldn’t see all of it, but di Perna pointed out a lyre dating back to the early 1800s hanging near a modern instrument to which it bore more than a passing resemblance, a 1958 Danelectro baritone guitar.

The other is a sort of celebrity room, for which the museum has collected a lot of instruments that were played on some famous recordings: Clapton’s Layla guitar, for example, and the plain brown upright John Lennon recorded “Imagine” on. (This is as opposed to the iconic white grand piano used in the early music video Lennon made with Yoko Ono.)

There’s also the first Steinway ever made, a 1836 piano Henry Steinway$$ made in his kitchen.

The museum’s inclusion philosophy is a broad one. Di Perna quotes one of the museum’s curators: “No high, no low; no art, no pop”—meaning that there are no restrictions along those lines. Everything is included, from indigenous African instruments to, well, to an ’80s-ea set of syn-drums from Belarus.

The museum will also do actual traveling exhibits; the first one, American Sabor, about Latin America’s influence on North American pop culture, will open later this year.

We concluded the tour with a look at the theater:

Details on the museum’s grand opening events on April 24 and 25 are here. Tickets for the first two “grand opening” days—and for any time after that—go on sale Thursday.