‘Central to human identity’: exhibition at the Met connects bodies with musical instruments
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- Musical Bodies, the Met's new exhibition curated by Bradley Strauchen-Scherer, traces 4,000 years of musical history and explores how human bodies and instruments have shaped each other across six continents.
- Strauchen-Scherer conceived the show after physically transporting roughly 600 Met instruments during gallery renovations, saying close handling revealed 'common threads' he hadn't previously seen across the collection.
- Prince's 'symbol guitar', commissioned in 1993, is featured as a case study in how instruments absorb personal identity — the curator argues Prince's gender-fluid iconography preceded his record-label disputes, citing the lyric 'I'm not a woman / I'm not a man / I am something that you'll never understand.'
- The Beatbox House is highlighted as proof that the human voice is the original instrument — hip-hop pioneers mimicked expensive drum kits with their mouths out of financial necessity, expanding what vocal performance could do.
- Molly Lewis, the international whistling champion, is featured for her work on the 2023 Barbie film soundtrack, specifically the Ruth Handler scene — with the curator noting humans originally whistled for long-distance communication.
- A dedicated subsection on courtship instruments includes a 19th-century Utagawa Kunisada woodblock print of a woman suggestively playing a shakuhachi and a 17th-century Bartholomeus van der Helst painting of a woman 'tuning a lute' — the curator noting this was a well-known Dutch allegory for foreplay.
- Musical Bodies runs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through September 27.
Why it matters: The Met is reframing instruments not as cultural artifacts in glass cases but as extensions of the human body, giving the museum's 600-piece collection a contemporary thesis — and giving visitors permission to see everyday music-making (streaming, humming, beatboxing) as a fundamental human practice rather than background noise.
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