Sounding the Pacific: Musical Instruments of Oceania

Sounding the Pacific: Musical Instruments of Oceania
Closes September 6, 2010
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Michael C. Rockefeller Wing

Musical instruments and musical expression take an almost infinite variety of forms throughout the world. This is especially true in Oceania (the Pacific Islands) whose more than 1,800 different peoples create an astonishing diversity of musical instruments. This exhibition—the first in an art museum to be devoted exclusively to Oceanic musical instruments explores the rich diversity of musical instruments created and used in the Pacific Islands. Drawn primarily from the Metropolitan’s collections, the exhibition features more than fifty instruments from small personal types such as panpipes and courting whistles to larger forms played at performances heard by the entire community, such as the exquisitely carved temple drums of the Austral Islands or the imposing sacred slit gongs of New Guinea.

For more information, please visit www.metmuseum.org.