Musical instruments

The collection of musical instruments includes 2500 pieces from the five continents. The main part of the collection was collected in the field from musicians by missionaries, doctors, explorers, researchers and ethnographers, many of whom were curators at the MEG, before being transferred to the museum.

One of the major acquisitions dates back to 1913. On that date, Maurice Bedot (1859-1927) gave the MEG more than 160 musical instruments that he had collected in 1890 in different regions of the East. In 1952, Marguerite Lobsiger-Dellenbach (1905-1993) collected a dozen musical instruments in Nepal. Accompanied by photographs and sound recordings made on site, this collection represents the very first initiative by a museum curator to build up an exhaustive ethnomusicological collection. The ethnomusicological collection of Nepal, enriched by Laurent Aubert (born in 1949) some twenty years later, represents a particularly well-studied cultural area in the MEG’s collection. Laurent Aubert subsequently conducted numerous research stays in the Indian subcontinent. From Kerala, he brought back more than 630 objects, including sets of musical instruments, sound recordings and audiovisual documents.

Among the important acquisitions made during different fieldwork research, we should mention a set of about 250 musical instruments from Amazonia, mainly collected between 1955 and 1987.

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