Musical Instruments
See Also: Music Resources
National Music Museum
Collections of around 14,500 instruments from American, European, and non-Western cultures, also includes an A - Z list of instrument makers with images online and a research database.
Yale Collection of Musical Instruments
Exhibits musical instruments from all cultures, from antiquity to the present.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Musical Instruments
View selected highlights from the collections of instruments chosen for historical importance as well as visual beauty, plus special online exhibitions.
MFA Boston: Musical Instruments
View a collection of over 1100 musical instruments from ancient times to the late twentieth century from all over the world.
MFA Boston: Musical Instruments Audio Tour
View selected musical instruments with brief sound recordings from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
MFA Boston: African Musical Instruments
A selection of mostly 19th and 20th century African musical instruments from the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Virtual Instrument Museum
An online museum of the World Musical Instrument Collection of Wesleyan University, search or browse by instrument type, material, genre, and region.
V&A: Musical Instruments
View a selection of instruments online from the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, also includes related resources.
Orpheon Foundation: Historical Musical Instruments
A collection of around 170 images online from the Vazquez Collection of historical musical instruments including mostly string instruments of the Baroque, the Renaissance, and the Classical Periods.
National Galleries of Scotland: Musical Instruments
A small collection of images including paintings by Pieter Roestraeten, David Allan, Sir William Allan, and others.
Music from the Land of the Jaguar
Collection of rare musical instruments of the ancient Americas from 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1519, a web project by Princeton University Art Museum.
Ethnomusicology Musical Instrument Collection
An online database of more than 400 musical instruments provided by the Ethnomusicology Division at the University of Washington, browse by geographic region, cultural area, or ensemble type, also browse sound and video files.
Dayton C. Miller Flute Collection
A Library of Congress online presentation of around 1,500 photographs and illustrations of flutes and other wind instruments plus related materials including information about American and European instrument makers and essays about Dayton Miller and his collection.
Piano 300
Celebrating Three Centuries of People and Pianos, an online exhibition from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
The Lemelson Center: Invention of the Electric Guitar
An introduction to the history of an important instrument that profoundly changed American musical technology, includes a gallery of electric guitars from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments
Includes an electronic picture gallery of instruments in the collection, a web guide to clarinets, demonstrations of instruments being played, and related information.
Stearns Collection Website
Heilbrunn: Instrument Maker
A list of around 37 instrument makers with images and related thematic essays in the artists index of the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
Thematic Essays and Images in the Subject Index
Nineteenth-Century Classical Music
The Guitar
Great Plains Indians Musical Instruments
