Coordinates: 59°20′01″N 18°04′42″E / 59.33351°N 18.07820°E / 59.33351; 18.07820
The Stockholm Music Museum was founded in 1899 (then named ”Musikhistoriska museet”), inspired by an exhibition of theatre and music which was part of the great Stockholm art and industry exhibition of 1897. Via donations and appeals for gifts around 200 musical instruments and an amount of archive material concerning the history of music and theatre were gathered. The new museum was opened to the general public in 1901. In 1932 the museum, in the form of a trust, was associated with the Royal Swedish Academy of Music and received a state grant. The state became increasingly responsible for the museum, which in 1981 became part of a new public body–The Swedish National Collections of Music. At the same time the museum was renamed The Stockholm Music Museum (Musikmuseet), since its activities had broadened and changed in character.
The collection now (2008) encompasses approximately 5,500 instruments with an emphasis on Western art music, and Scandinavian folk music instruments. Many of these can now be seen (and heard) on the museum's own web site: www.musikmuseet.se
Since 1979 the Stockholm Music Museum is located in the splendid former Crown Bakery, in the same quarter as the Court Stables, beside the Royal Dramatic Theatre, in central Stockholm. The Crown Bakery dates from the 17th century, and is Stockholm’s oldest industrial building.
This building has a long and eventful history and has through the centuries performed a number of functions: bakery, weapon depot, spirits store. Yet almost all the time—from the 1640s to 1958—it has been a bakery for the armed forces in Stockholm. It even boasted mobile ovens which could be used during field exercises. In 1945 the building was ravaged by a fire which destroyed its upper floors in the northern part–where the Concert Hall is now located.
A large portion of the museum's instrument collection is viewable on the museum's webpage, and will from 2010 onwards, be available through the EU's europeana culture webportal: www.europeana.eu
Famous quotes containing the words stockholm, music and/or museum:
“He was begotten in the galley and born under a gun. Every hair was a rope yarn, every finger a fish-hook, every tooth a marline-spike, and his blood right good Stockholm tar.”
—Naval epitaph.
“This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air; thence have I followed it,
Or it hath drawn me rather.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)