Musical Sculptures: An Aesthetic View of Sonority From September 19, 2013, through April 21, 2014, the Museu de la Música in Barcelona will be presenting an unprecedented exhibition. Escultures musicals: instruments d’Àfrica, Àsia, Oceania i Amèrica de la Fundació La Fontana (Musical Sculptures: Instruments of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas from the La Fontana Foundation) is the first temporary exhibition ever to be dedicated entirely to non-European musical instruments from four continents. It was organized by this municipal institution, which was founded in 1946. Since 2007, it has been located in the same building as the city’s main auditorium, a sumptuous setting designed to highlight the formal characteristics of objects that are normally considered only for their sound qualities in specialized museums. The importance given the opening of Escultures musicals is underscored by the choice of venue created for it: The show will be located in the heart of the permanent collection display area rather than in the adjoining gallery normally used for temporary exhibitions. This choice made it necessary for the museum to dismantle more than a quarter of its display cases, which are elegant glass boxes of considerable height that, for the most part, make it possible to contemplate their contents from all angles. The space created will accommodate the exhibition’s 130 selections, which comprise the most beautiful instruments in the Helena Folch Collection, normally housed and studied at the Fundacion Fontana, from which they have never before been moved. While this private collection is not well known to the greater public, it is to tribal art enthusiasts and ethnomusicologists thanks in large part to the two fine books that the foundation has published. The first, Africa, Musica y Arte (2008), is on the collection’s African holdings, and the second, Invocando a los Espiritos (2011), presents the highlights of its instruments from Indonesia and Oceania, which were described in this magazine’s summer 2012 issue. These books created awareness of the By Elena Martínez-Jacquet ART on view importance of this collection, which was started in the 1970s by a passionately interested couple with impeccable taste. It currently consists of some 2,000 examples from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Though useful, these books are limited in their scope and don’t give a sense of the real scale and extent of this fine collection. The installation at the Museu de la Música takes a different a different approach and seeks to present an effective survey that expresses the beauty of this unique patrimony. The result will be well worth a visit to Barcelona. At the very least, the catalog that will accompany the show will be a must-have. Musical Instruments or Sculptures? But what will the visitor really discover? The question might seem superfluous because we know that 130 musical instruments will be displayed. But in the exhibition’s title, Escultures musicals: instruments d’Àfrica, Àsia, Oceania i Amèrica, the word “instruments” is placed after the word “sculptures” in such a way as to suggest that these
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