Musical Bodies

Some 130 instruments, paintings, sculptures and drawings on the body as instrument and the instrument as body, across 4,000 years. Gallery 199. The Met's 1720 Cristofori piano is not in it and stays in Gallery 684.

The show began as a question its curator has described as deceptively simple: why are so many musical instruments shaped and decorated like the human body? Bradley Strauchen-Scherer, a curator in the Met's Department of Musical Instruments, spent about seven years turning that into an exhibition, assisted by Ava Valentino as research assistant. The answer the show proposes is not a matter of ornament. It argues that the resemblance runs in both directions - that the body has always been used as an instrument, by clapping, tapping, whistling and beatboxing, and that instruments in turn borrow the form, the proportions and the decoration of the body that plays them.

That is a thesis a musical instruments department could have illustrated from its own storerooms alone. The Met chose not to. Objects were drawn from ten of the museum's curatorial departments, and the show's own press release makes the point that the instruments account for only about fifty of the roughly 130 works. The rest are paintings, sculpture, drawings, apparel and objects from ancient Egypt, European painting, and modern and contemporary art. The instruments are the subject; they are not the whole exhibition.

The loans are the measure of how seriously this was taken. Instruments came from the Musee de la musique in Paris, the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota, and the Royal College of Music in London. Two objects are being shown in the United States for the first time: a rare figural lira da braccio from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which is among the earliest surviving bowed string instruments anywhere, and an elaborate hurdy gurdy from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

A first American showing for a Vienna lira da braccio is the kind of fact that does not survive into most listings, and it is the one a reader planning a journey actually needs. Neither object is a household name and neither will tour afterwards on the evidence available. For a visitor who cares about early bowed strings, this is a four-month window in one gallery on Fifth Avenue.

The six thematic sections are organised around what instruments are for beyond making sound: spirituality, identity, and what the museum describes plainly as the use of instruments to stand in for the body in order to address subjects normally treated as taboo, specifically sex and death. This is the part of the show that justifies the scale of the loan list rather than a display of fine woodwork.

The objects carry the argument more bluntly than the wall text does. A steel guitar was built in the form of a crutch for the country singer Barbara Mandrell while she was recovering from a car crash - an instrument shaped by an injured body, for that body. At the other end, a guitar-shaped coffin by the Ghanaian carpenter Paa Joe, titled For A Musician, is an instrument shape made to hold a body that has stopped playing. Between those two, the claim that an instrument is a proxy for a person stops being a curatorial conceit.

Musical Bodies was built as an experiential show rather than a vitrine survey, and this is where the risk sits. There is an interactive that lets visitors generate music through ordinary movement, and large-scale projections of newly commissioned footage of beatboxing, body percussion and tap dancing by performers including the tap dancer Savion Glover, Beatbox House and the whistler Molly Lewis. Live performances and workshops run in the gallery through the four months, announced piecemeal rather than as a fixed schedule, so what a given visitor sees depends on the day they come.

One factual discrepancy is worth recording rather than smoothing over. The Met's own press release of 15 January 2026 states that the show draws on ten of its curatorial departments; the amNewYork review published on 16 June 2026, after the opening, states that it draws on all seventeen. Both cannot be right, and we have not found a later correction from the museum. We print the museum's own figure and note that a reviewer who walked the installation counted differently.

The show opened to warm coverage that has concentrated on its range and on the interactive and performance elements rather than on the scholarship, with reviewers treating the sheer spread of four thousand years and ten departments as the achievement.