Music Museums and Musical Instrument Collections

There are more than 150 music museums in Germany specialising in musicians, musical instruments or regional music history. Among their aims are to collect, conserve and communicate the posthumous estates of famous composers or performers; to present, document, contextualise and research the products of musical instrument builders; and to explore regional and historical aspects of musical culture. In the case of such preeminent composers as Heinrich Schütz, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, the preservation, cataloguing and communication of their posthumous effects reflect not only their historical significance in Germany, but the importance of their music in today’s international repertoire altogether. Accordingly, one of the tasks of museums is to cultivate the memory of such towering figures and to shed light on their working environment and historical surroundings. Only when their music is illuminated in educational programmes, special exhibitions and concerts is it possible to gain an understanding and appreciation of our cultural heritage, and thus to kindle interest in the on-going cultivation, conservation and fresh interpretation of the artefacts of musical culture. However, many composers' residences also conduct research and, by cataloguing the sources entrusted to them, provide a basis for scholarly research into the life and work of the historical figures concerned.

Many composers have drawn inspiration for their music not least from the musical instrument industry, which set new historical standards as it evolved, be it the production of outstanding brass instruments in Nuremberg, the development of German piano-making commencing with Gottfried Silbermann; lute and violin making in Füssen and Mittenwald or Jacob Denner’s invention of the clarinet. Museums thus have the mission not only to document the life and works of major figures of music history, but also to conserve and update valuable collections of musical instruments, many of which date back to the 19th century or even earlier. They are also tasked with critically analysing the tradition of the cabinets of curiosities and rarities, their own history and the role of museums in colonialism. Music museums and instrument collections are similar in that both offer objects, sources and knowledge of inestimable value to the study of music. Today some museums not only house and catalogue their collections, but also conduct active research programmes as varied and manifold as the sources and objects they preserve, ranging from the study of materials to the exploration of their provenance.

The financing of these institutions is extremely heterogeneous, since the federal government, federal states, cities, and municipalities as well as foundations, associations and private individuals can act as sponsors and sponsoring organisations. For some museums, this results in a precarious financial situation, not only reflected in a lack of staffing and less flexible opening hours but also making museum education, consistent outreach work, appropriate conservation, and sensible steps towards digitisation or sustainable research into museum objects more difficult. For this reason, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has added to the core tasks of museums the requirement for a permanent institutional and financial basis, a mission statement and museum concept, museum management and qualified staff. 

Not least due to the pandemic-related slump in visitor numbers, museums have been forced to undergo a strategic change, concerning not only knowledge transfer, efficiency and well-being in the museum, but also aspects such as inclusion, diversity, sustainability, digitisation, artificial intelligence, democratic education, the identification of colonial injustice, provenance research, restitution, transcultural museum work, social participation, collection concepts, the redesign of permanent exhibitions, accessibility and participation. Museums today also see themselves as a central place for debates, conflicts and discussions of values. At the same time, they want to convey sensual, aesthetic and intellectual knowledge through adventure, play and emotion.

Museums devoted to musicians

Germany has 54 museums with collections reflecting the life and work of musicians, in most cases composers. Museums dedicated to female musicians or composers do not (yet) exist - excepting female artists such as Fanny Mendelssohn or Clara Schumann, who are honoured in connection with their male relatives. Musicians' museums are often located in the place where an artist worked or was born and are designed to recreate the home’s original living atmosphere. Sometimes they display the owner’s musical instruments or somehow connected to him. In a special way, they shed light on the social and cultural environment of the personalities concerned, by displaying their personal furniture (or furniture from the same period), paintings, busts, memorabilia, musical instruments, autograph scores, letters and other original documents. Memorabilia, such as life and/or death masks, are also often part of the inventory. Frequently their activities are supported by non-profit societies such as the Brahmsgesellschaft Baden-Baden, the Georg-Friedrich-Händel-Gesellschaft in the Handel House in Halle, the Internationale Carl-Löwe-Gesellschaft in Wettin-Löbejün or the Hamburg Telemann-Gesellschaft. These sometimes also function as the museums’ sponsors.

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of new permanent exhibitions and memorial sites. The ‘Leipzig Period of the Schumanns’, explores whether gender equality in art exists or ever existed. The Schumann House in Düsseldorf opened in December 2023 after four years of refurbishment and building expansion in line with conservation requirements. The new permanent exhibition combines valuable originals, conveying the atmosphere of 19th-century bourgeois culture, with media stations and installations. Other newly founded institutions of late include the international Kurt Masur Institute in the Mendelssohn House in Leipzig; also the COMU Carl Orff Museum in Dießen am Ammersee, which (from 2025 onwards) aims to offer an inclusive and playful approach to Carl Orff's artistic and educational work; the mission statement, concepts, objectives and programmes can already be explored online. The E.T.A. Hoffman House in Bamberg is also currently being renovated and is scheduled to reopen in 2026.

Some musician museums are accompanied by specialised archives and research institutes to document, preserve and disseminate the artist’s musical legacy, to collect and study manuscripts and other sources, to issue complete editions, separate prints and publication series, to encourage publications and to carry out digitisation projects. Here, new research results are presented in permanent or special exhibitions. Institutes of this type with an international presence include the Beethoven House in Bonn, the Leipzig Bach Archive, the Handel House in Halle, the Robert Schumann House in Zwickau, the Richard Strauss Institute in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the Richard Wagner Museum with national archive and research centre in Bayreuth. There are also other institutes, some smaller, housing archives that are no less important.

Many private individuals, societies, foundations and citizens’ initiatives have devoted themselves to the preservation and rebuilding of historical sites where important musicians formerly lived and worked. They seek support for their projects from the cultural policymakers of their municipality, their state or the federal government. Therefore, in an effort to achieve greater public visibility, many composer’s houses have revised the way they display their holdings and modernised and/or enlarged their premises. The recent construction or remodelling of buildings reflects a change both in museum education and in the importance attached to these buildings today. The Wagner Museum in Bayreuth, to take an example, has remodelled the Villa Wahnfried and created, alongside Wagner’s residence, a translucent glass-and-steel museum in sharp architectural contrast to the neighbouring villa. The aim of the museum is to turn the aura of Wagner’s place of work and residence into a living experience while reminding visitors of Bayreuth’s ambivalent and precarious impact on history. It documents the ideological history of Wagner and the so-called Bayreuth Circle, the close connection between Bayreuth and the Nazi dictatorship and the Wagner family's personal relationships with Adolf Hitler in particular.

In anticipation of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020, the Beethoven House in Bonn was refurbished and extended to include a ‘digital Beethoven House’. In addition to a selection of 150 original documents from Beethoven's time in Bonn and Vienna, on display in Beethoven's birthplace, state-of-the-art presentation formats in the new digital Beethoven House take visitors on a multimedia journey of discovery through Beethoven's life and work: Beethoven's music is reinterpreted as an audiovisual experience and staged in virtual space. Visitors can view digital copies of manuscripts on computers, call up and listen to audible autographs and read along with or listen to readings from Beethoven's letters. The permanent exhibition’s narrative is aimed at the flâneur; it is not told biographically and chronologically but in fragments. The digitisation of the Beethoven House's collection and library content was supported by the German Research Foundation, and also with funding from the Bonn-Berlin Act. A cooperation with the Bonn University computer centre guarantees loss-free long-term archiving of the data storage media. The Beethoven House as a particular example makes it clear that modern museum digitisation no longer only satisfies the needs of specialists by making documents and sources available for research in the best possible resolution. Non-experts can also browse, search for quotations from Beethoven, create a greeting card, experience his favourite composition or learn about the musical instruments of Beethoven's time.

A unique bundling of synergy has been successfully achieved in Hamburg by KomponistenQuartier, comprising the Telemann Museum, the Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Museum, the Johann Adolf Hasse Museum, the Brahms Museum, the Museum for Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn and the Gustav Mahler Museum. The sponsoring organisation, KomponistenQuartier Hamburg, was initiated by the Carl Toepfer Foundation in conjunction with the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, the Telemann Society Hamburg, the Carl Philip Emanuel Bach Society Hamburg, the Hasse Society Bergedorf, the Fanny und Felix Mendelssohn Society, the Johannes Brahms Society Hamburg and the Gustav Mahler Association. The conductor Kent Nagano was won as a patron. The goal of the initiative is to convey Hamburg’s importance to music history and to underscore its impact on the city’s musical and cultural life today, from the new Elbphilharmonie concert hall to the Reeperbahn Festival.

In contrast, artists and composers expelled or murdered during the Third Reich continue to receive short shrift. Exceptions include the Busch Brothers Memorial Site in Siegen and the Kurt Weill Centre in Dessau. 

A look at the map of music museums and other composer-related institutions in Germany illustrates the different types of institutions described above. There are museums that preserve, research and exhibit objects, memorial sites displaying permanent exhibitions, museums that manage archives and estates, and institutions with affiliated research institutes. Several museums are dedicated to important composers such as Bach, Brahms or Schumann, as these musicians were active in different places or they did not spend their active life at their birthplace.

Musical instrument museums

As a rule, museums devoted to musicians are organised as independent entities. In contrast, most of the 75 musical instrument collections form departments within larger institutions, whether these be universities, research institutes, state, regional or municipal museums, or museums focusing on technology, cultural history or the arts. Musical instrument museums can be distinguished by their collections’ focus. Some take a comprehensive approach and display the broad spectrum of instruments from European and occasionally non-European music. Their task resides in preserving, cataloguing and expanding their collections, placing their holdings in the context of musical and cultural history, and examining and communicating the function, use and construction of musical instruments. Others are concerned exclusively with particular families of instruments (e.g. keyboard instruments, brass instruments or musical automata). They examine the technological evolution, manufacture and use of their particular group of instruments, often within the context of local history. For example, in 1930 a Museum of Violin Building was established in the town of Mittenwald, an historical centre of violin makers, to reflect the industry’s 300-year tradition within the history of the area. Today the Musical Instrument Museum in Markneukirchen deals in much the same way with the cultural history of the Vogtland region, known as Germany’s ‘music corner’. This museum, established as early as 1883 by the Markneukirchen Trade Association, originally had a quite practical purpose: being a ‘trade museum’, it provided local instrument makers with models for the manufacture of their instruments and visual aids for teachers at the trade school of instrument making, thereby ensuring that they kept abreast of international developments. (Absatz)

Though most of today’s noteworthy collections were in fact founded in the 19th century, the objects displayed in musical instrument museums often derive from private collections or from the holdings of former courts or aristocratic houses. For example, the Bavarian National Museum in Munich holds both the unique historical instrument collections owned by the Wittelsbach dynasty in the 17th and 18th centuries together with musical instruments from the former court music directorship.

Other smaller collections, such as the Historical Keyboard Instrument Foundation – part of the Neumeyer Junghans Tracey Collection at Bad Krozingen Castle – have achieved national and even international stature owing to their inventories’ exclusivity. As in many similar cases, the instruments were gathered by private collectors.

Among the ‘global players’ of musical instrument museums are those at Leipzig University and the Musical Instrument Museum in Berlin. Its history dates back to 1888, when a ‘collection of old musical instruments’ was established under the auspices of renowned violinist Joseph Joachim and music researcher Philipp Spitta in what was then known as the Royal Academic High School of Music. Its basic stock of 34 instruments from the holdings of the Prussian Chamber of Art was augmented in 1902 by two collections from the Leipzig publisher and music dealer Paul de Wit and the private collection of César Snoeck, a solicitor based in Ghent. At the beginning of the 20th century they were initially displayed in Cologne in the ‘Wilhelm Heyer Museum of Music History’ and in 1926 were then sold to Leipzig University as an educational collection. At present the museum can boast of some 3,600 instruments related to art music of the 16th to 20th centuries. The Musical Instrument Museum of Leipzig University likewise stems from the collections of Paul de Wit. Today it has more then 9,000 objects illustrating the evolution of European musical instruments from the Renaissance to the present day, as well as mechanical instruments, historical sound recording devices, non-European musical instruments and an iconographical collection. The collections in both Berlin and Leipzig were originally designed for purposes of study at the local music school or university, respectively. 

Research areas of the musical instrument museums concern, for example, organology (musical instrument studies), historically informed performance and interpretation research. From 2009 to 2011 nine European museums joined forces to work on the MIMO research project (Musical Instrument Museums Online) with the goal of making all the instruments in their collections accessible online. The German institutes involved in this project were the Musical Instrument Museum of Leipzig University, the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg and the Ethnological Museum, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. Internationally renowned is musiXplora, the virtual research environment developed in recent years at Leipzig University's Musical Instrument Museum. The added value of this virtual reference work for organology and musicology lies in the indexing of object and research data, which goes far beyond purely digital accessibility. Initiated by the Federal Government, the development of the National Research Infrastructure for Cultural Studies and the Humanities (NFDI4Culture) can only be enabled via data networking, standardisation and the use of the Common Authority File and digital collections. The DIGITAL ORGANOLOGY research centre was recently established at Leipzig University's Musical Instrument Museum as part of several digitisation and research projects funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. It identifies reliable and controlled comparative data that is compiled and standardised across collections all over the world, in a prosopography of text-, number- and media-based research data. The research centre at Leipzig University's Musical Instrument Museum cooperates with several other German universities and colleges that possess musical instrument collections for educational purposes. These include, for example, the musical instrument collection at Göttingen University’s Department of Musicology, with 1,700 European instruments from rural folk traditions and European art music; and the collection KLANGKÖRPER (Foundation Dr. h.c. Karl Ventzke) at Tübingen University. 

The Technical Equipment and Instrument Collection at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen also includes electronic, mechanical and electro-mechanical instruments from the synthesizer to the mixing desk. The Institute for Computer Music and Electronic Media (ICEM) at that same university is concerned with being able to reconstruct the sound of electronic music, e.g. from the 1950s, for which the original equipment is indispensable. The historical keyboard instrument collection from the Schiedmayer company in Wendlingen am Neckar has also been recently opened to the public. Other collections are not open to the public, such as those of musical instruments at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg or at the Institute for Music Research at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Würzburg.

Musical instrument-making centres have developed in various places in Germany (see the map above). Mittenwald’s importance as a centre of German violin making, for example, dates back to Mathias Kloz (1653-1743) and Andreas Jais (1685-1753). After training in northern Italy, Kloz returned to his native town. This was conveniently located on a trade route, close to forests with good quality wood, did not impose any guild restrictions and was therefore a suitable place to establish a workshop of supra-regional importance. Markneukirchen and the Vogtland region benefited from Bohemian ‘exiles’, religious refugees from Bohemia who came to Saxony as early as 1650. Among them were twelve master violin makers: these joined together in March 1677 to form a violin makers' guild. Here too, instrument making flourished, favoured by the abundance of wood in the region and the existence of old trade routes. This soon extended to encompass woodwind and brass instruments.

Museums with an emphasis on regional music history

Some 20 regional museums in Germany display musical instruments and other musical items (often alongside other collections) as they relate to local musical or cultural history. Very different emphases are placed on the evaluation and presentation of individual cities’ and regions’ musical life. 

Due to the division of Germany into numerous principalities during the absolutism period, musical instruments, music manuscripts and other historical sources from the musical centres of the time have been preserved in some museums: for example, in the Thuringian residences of Sondershausen and Rudolstadt. Lute and violin making in Füssen has a dedicated section in the town’s museum.

The Markgräfliches Opernhaus in Bayreuth, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2012, presents its magnificent baroque theatre exhibition using multi-sensory principles. The exhibition area features a tactile guidance system, a musical station with vibropad, touch, smell and listening stations. The illusionistic world of baroque theatre is conveyed, among other things, by a true-to-scale, functional stage reconstruction, inviting visitors to experiment with it.

The foundations of the Musical Instrument Collection of the Historisches Museum Frankfurt am Main were laid back in the 1880s. The Museum was founded by acquiring instruments from the 16th and 17th-century municipal brass bands, the Frankfurt Pfeifergericht (piper court) and the Frankfurt Citizen's Military from the Free City period (1816-1866). In the 19^th century the emerging middle classes created centres of music outside the court environment. It was owing to these developments in cultural history that the City Museum in Braunschweig acquired musical instruments formerly owned by the Brüderkirche and the Civil Guard, as it was mainly the citizens of Braunschweig city who donated or bequeathed them. The museum was founded in 1861. 

The importance of urban infrastructure for local musical culture is the theme of the Märkisches Museum of Berlin’s City Museum Foundation, which displays mechanical instruments as testaments to Berlin’s musical life between street music and middle-class parlours. In 2025, the Bubenreuther Museumsverein plans to realise a newly conceived exhibition on the topic of ‘Music and Integration’ in the upcoming Bubenreutheum and to develop new storage rooms.

Some museums at the state level contain not only instrument collections but also documents on the musical life and creativity in the region concerned, including sheet music, theatre playbills and concert programmes from various institutions.

Other museums

One relatively new phenomenon in Germany’s museum landscape are museums devoted to popular music, one of the largest of these is the rock'n'pop museum in Gronau, the birthplace of musician Udo Lindenberg, which opened in 2004 and illustrates the history of pop music with exhibits on consumer electronics, youth culture and memorabilia.

Museums of popular music combine the concept of a musician museum with ideas from cultural sociology. They also take into account that the origin and evolution of rock and pop music are inseparably connected with musical instruments, from the electric guitar to the Hammond organ and the Moog synthesizer. Sound’s development from the wax cylinder to digital sonic art plays a special role here. The Halle/Saale Beatles Museum and Siegen’s ‘The smallest Beatles Museum in the world’, both privately run, shed light on the Beatles phenomenon. The museum of modern electronic music (MOMEM), founded in Frankfurt/M. in 2022, is dedicated to the history of electronic club music’s creation and development and Frankfurt artists’ pioneering and innovative impact in the techno and house music genres. 

Likewise outside the standard canon of museums are those devoted to music education. Rather than viewing themselves as institutions that collect, preserve, document and study objects, they focus on learning and experimentation for children and young people with or without handicaps. In the wake of music outreach programmes intent on conveying the museum’s holdings through hands-on experience, especially to young visitors, six music museums have emerged in Germany that allow visitors to try out various instruments with educational supervision.

In Berlin, for example, the exclusively privately financed ‘Klingendes Museum’ is a subsidiary of the ‘Klingendes Museum Hamburg’, housed in Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie since 2017 as ‘Instrumentenwelt’ and offering child-friendly digital programmes under the motto ‘Making music is easy’. A van with a variety of musical instruments, the Elbphilharmonie's ‘Klingendes Mobil’, stops off at district centres and daycare centres throughout Hamburg, allowing children to experience music playfully.  At Kiel’s ‘musiculum’, children and young people can try instruments, play in the film music orchestra or synchronise animated films. The Toccarion at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden offers guided tours and workshops to children aged 5 to12, to discover music and learn about voice, singing, rhythm, dance, musical instruments and the orchestra. The Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz has set up the KlangReich education room, to introduce children and young people to symphony orchestra instruments.

Ethnological museums and collections

Large parts of the tangible and intangible collections from all over the world found in ethnological museums today were collected under colonial conditions, including numerous musical instruments. In addition, some museums have musical instruments made from human remains; for example, human skull drums and trumpets made from human bones. These collection items have been increasingly criticised in recent years. Triggering media debate on colonial injustice in Germany in particular was the reconstruction of the Berliner Stadtschloss, housing the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation's ethnological collection – containing around 7,000 musical instruments – in the Humboldt Forum; and the resignation of cultural historian and Leibniz Prize winner Bénédicte Savoy from the expert advisory board in July 2017. As a result, ethnological museums have tasked themselves with critically analysing their own history and role in colonialism. This is reflected in the exhibitions and events organised by the museums. Where possible, the systematic investigation of the collection's acquisition circumstances is crucial, also regarding possible restitution. 

Prominent examples include the Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt in Hamburg (MARKK, until 2018 Museum für Völkerkunde) and the musical instrument collection at Cologne’s Rautenstrauch Joest Museum, which centres on the gamelan.Visitors are enabled to experience the instruments by listening and playing. At the same time, the Rautenstrauch Joest Museum is committed to interdisciplinary, post-colonial research into its collections. It proactively seeks dialogue, knowledge exchange and cooperation with the descendants of the societies that originally owned their collections. Participation and inclusion are seen as important elements for the plurality and transparency of new research methods. New digitisation strategies and the gradual indexing and disclosure of their collections’ provenance have become one of ethnological museums’ core tasks. 

Musical instruments from non-European cultures are also occasionally found in collections otherwise limited to European objects, for example at the Georg August University in Göttingen, the City Museum in Munich or the Museums of Musical Instruments in Berlin and Leipzig. In the future, the adequate research and exhibition of these musical instruments must incorporate the new, post-colonial research methods.

Provenance research

Provenance research aims to trace collections’ origins as completely as possible, from their creation to their current storage location. The legal, political, cultural and scientific circumstances and perspectives under which the cultural artefacts came to the museum need clarification. In the course of persecuting and eliminating people, the Nazi state enriched itself extensively from their property, specifically concentrating on cultural assets and artworks. In addition to open robbery, the confiscation often occurred indirectly: for instance, when persecuted people were forced to sell their property to pay special taxes such as the ‘Judenvermögensabgabe’ (‘Jewish property levy’) or to finance their flight into exile. Cultural property that was not directly looted but handed over, or sold under duress, for example, is therefore also considered ‘Nazi-looted property’. The German Lost Art Foundation promotes provenance research in museums, for example, in the Musicology Institute Instrument Museum at Cologne University. This collection grew to over 180 exhibits between 1932 and 1991 - including historical string and wind instruments, non-European instruments and educational models. The collection’s acquisition analysis of the Nazi era revealed that the provenance of 86 objects – almost half of the objects analysed – requires further research. A provenance research project at the Musical Instrument Museum at Leipzig University, also funded by the German Lost Art Foundation, looked at a partial collection of 256 objects previously owned by musical artist Paul Kaiser-Reka, who had amassed his extensive collection in the interwar years. Further research was required for a quarter of these objects, and two were entered in the Lost Art Database as questionable or as cultural property seized as a result of Nazi persecution. Provenance research has recently been extended to include the expropriation of private property without compensation in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR. This is also supported by the German Lost Art Foundation. Legalities aside, more than 30 years after the end of the GDR there is still a need for a systematic reappraisal of cultural property expropriation and its implementation, as well as its overall loss between 1945 and 1990. Nevertheless, music museums have not yet addressed this issue.

Challenges of the digital age

Digital technologies provide great benefits, allowing cultural availability for everyone and enabling access to cultural participation and integration. The cultural sector has experienced a digitisation boost resulting from the coronavirus crisis. There have been many creative ideas and developments supported by the federal government with various programmes and aid measures, including the NEUSTART KULTUR programme. For example, the Organeum (organ centre) of the Orgelakademie Friesland was provided with funding for photography, audio recordings, video production, internal internet, multimedia steles and website creation. Interactive stations, podcasts and target group-specific audio guides make it possible to offer cultural programmes that are not tied to a specific location and can increase museum outreach. At the same time, digital programmes in museums develop expertise and confidence in dealing with new media, among visitors, creatives and designers.

One particular challenge for music museums is the interoperability, compatibility, presentation and long-term availability of their inherently multimodal data: two-dimensional images, 3D scans, video clips, audio recordings, etc. The difficulties yet to be overcome here are encountered on numerous museum websites, where films or podcasts can only be hosted via proprietary services. As with reliable, long-term data archiving, federal government initiative is required. Music museums consequently also regard themselves as sources of inspiration, instances of critical reflection and ethical corrective measures concerning digital change and its consequences.

The Übersee-Museum in Bremen, for example, addressed digitisation as a mediation topic in the archival storage cabinet exhibition ‘Digi... What?’, shedding light on its collection work and allowing visitors a look behind the scenes. A project funded by the Federal Minister of Culture and Media at the Berlin Musical Instrument Museum is another example of digital cultural change reflection. Regarding the materiality and virtuality of museum objects, it asks: How sensually tangible, virtual and inclusive can and should music-related knowledge transfer be?
 

Outreach programmes and museum education

Music museums increasingly view themselves not only as sites of documentation and conservation, but particularly as active educational facilities. In museums devoted to musicians the focus of educational programmes falls on enlivening the life and work of the artist in question. Musical instrument collections increasingly place their exhibits in the context of musical and social history. For this reason practically all music museums offer special guided tours and programmes, especially for children and young people, acknowledging that cultural education works best when the museum’s visitors are actively engaged.

Of course, exhibitions are a central component of museum education. They are often emotionally and intellectually stimulating and contribute to a lasting engagement with the content presented. The musical instrument department at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, for example, displays around 70 orchestral instruments impressively in a huge glass cube, seemingly floating.

Video clips and computer animation can be used to illustrate complex acoustical processes, the intricate construction of an object, the importance of a composer to cultural history or the concert appearances of a particular performer. Today, however, media are primarily employed interactively, as passive observation is seemingly undesirable to visitors and exhibitors alike. Here a balance must be struck between actionism and exploration.

Another means of conveying the research material of music museums lies in lecture-concerts that take into account the original sound of instruments and provide information on aspects of historical performance practice. Special exhibitions, catalogues, symposia, lectures and seminars, sometimes in conjunction with universities, research institutes or visitors’ academies, round off the outreach programmes of these facilities. Moreover, several museums hold performance competitions for young musicians aiming to introduce works by particular composers into the repertoire of burgeoning  virtuosos.

Leipzig’s Schumann-Haus offers an augmented reality app in which artists reflect on their current lives balancing career, family and gender roles. As a result, the museum is increasingly becoming a ‘third place’: a social space away from home (the first place) and work (the second place) bringing people into contact with each other and creating a sense of social belonging.

Music museums as tourist attractions

Cultural tourism is another active area for many museums, attracting tourists with higher educational demands to their cities. The focus increasingly tends to fall on collaborations with the tourist trade industry, the improvement of local infrastructure (public transport, signposting, restaurants, cafés, revitalisation), the adjustment of opening hours, an emphasis on service, multilingual supervisory staff and accessibility for the handicapped. Many visitors show great interest particularly in programmes, concerts or workshops tailored for children. Even such mundane things as the presence of a gift shop can be decisive for the number of visitors to a museum. Here it is crucial to pinpoint the institution’s strengths and weaknesses with visitors’ polls and evaluations and to devise appropriate responses.

The Institute for Museum Research determined that in 2022, between 45 and 61 per cent of visitors – depending on the museum’s size – were tourists. Tourism places particular demands on public relations, guided tours, exhibitions, accessibility, educational work, internet presence and opening hours.

Associations

A number of associations represent the interests of museums on the national and international level. The German Federation of Museums is the nationwide association for all museums in Germany. The Institute for Museum Research in Berlin’s Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) is a nationwide research and documentation facility that represents the concerns of the Foundation, the federal government and the German states within a pan-European context. The German Musicological Society has a special chapter for the study of musical instruments that functions as a forum and clearinghouse for information regarding instrument collections attached to research institutes and universities. The workgroup Music Museums in Germany represents a number of important establishments devoted to preserving the legacy of outstanding composers and artists.

On an international level, museums are organised in the International Council of Museums (ICOM), which is devoted to the cause of conserving, cultivating and communicating the world’s cultural heritage. Its internationally valid Code of Ethics for Museums calls for a documentation of museum collections ‘in accordance with generally recognised professional standards’. The ICOM works in many specialised commissions, with music museums being organised in the ICOM music committee.

Summary

The tasks of music museums have diversified remarkably in recent years and undergone considerable expansion. The classical tasks – collecting, preserving, communicating – have become more transparent, and more complex, owing to the modern demands placed on cataloguing, documentation, site administration and provenance research. At the same time conservation and restoration are becoming increasingly standardised, professionalised and given a more scholarly basis. Research in museums today also focuses on making its findings accessible to a wide range of interested parties. This not only entails the indexing and digitisation of the material but also sets high standards for the museums' communication work. In recent years, extensive digitisation projects have been added to the established tasks of several composer residence museums – publications, series, editions, critical complete editions – inspiring initiatives for common standards in interoperability, compatibility, presentation and long-term availability.

A look at the larger projects of recent years clearly shows that museums are more successful in alliances, be it the Hamburg KomponistenQuartier or research projects such as MUSICES and musiXplora. Collaborations with digital humanities, media designers and architects are desirable, but not feasible for all museums.

Influenced by Anglo-American models, museum education in Germany is undergoing a transformation that places the main focus on visitors and their active role in the museum. Many museums have become more aware of the importance of private sponsors, who are being addressed and nurtured as a target group more than was the case just a few years ago.  Museum managements  have already realised that a museum’s theme and contents, the architecture of its building, its interior décor and the design of its exhibitions are of crucial importance to its attractiveness. Expressions of this transformation include the widespread remodelling and new construction of museum buildings, fresh conceptions for permanent exhibitions, exciting special exhibitions and revised websites and databases.