Research Center for Music Iconography, The Graduate Center, City University of New

York

Installation, Technology and Education in the Communication Strategies of the Museo

Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna
Author(s): Enrico Tabellini
Source: Music in Art , Vol. 39, No. 1-2 (Spring–Fall 2014), pp. 281-291
Published by: Research Center for Music Iconography, The Graduate Center, City
University of New York
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/90012965

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 Music in Art XXXIX/1–2 (2014)

INSTALLATION, TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION IN THE COMMUNICATION

STRATEGIES OF THE MUSEO INTERNAZIONALE E BIBLIOTECA DELLA MUSICA
DI BOLOGNA

ENRICO TABELLINI

Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna

Music is the most immaterial and refractory art when it comes to its museum presentation, and con-
serving music for the purpose of its exhibiting is in the strictest sense impossible. We have today more means
to preserve and present musical events than ever before, but the places in which musical practices are con-
served, passed down, modified and kept alive will always remain those that are designated for its produc-
tion, such as theaters, public squares, churches, oratories, auditoriums, stadiums, and music clubs but not
museums of music. So, what do we mean by “museum of music”?
Leaving aside museums dedicated to individual artists, the concept of a music museum refers usually
to a museum of music-related documents. The distinction between performing venues and music museums
may appear pedantic, but its implications are fundamental for our analysis of music on display. Indeed,
exhibition places like a picture gallery or an art museum present to viewers artifacts in their finalized form;
on display are artworks which the artist had chosen to make public. Music museums on the other hand
present objects that are related to the creation and performance of musical compositions, but they do not
present the sounding artwork itself. At the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna visitors
can observe, admire and contemplate the most important music unica such as the earliest printed score, the
first edition of the libretto and two parts of the first opera, but they cannot hear these works. The collection
also includes more than a hundred paintings, over eighty old musical instruments and a wide selection of
historical treatises, opera libretti, letters, manuscripts and autograph scores bequeathed by Padre Giovanni
Battista Martini, one of the most illustrious figures in eighteenth-century European music, but these are all
objects that served to create music, and not music itself.
STRATEGIES OF MEDIATION BETWEEN VISITORS, COLLECTIONS AND MUSIC. Items on display at the
Bologna museum tell stories through their relationships with other objects as well as through their prove-
nance. The concept of presenting objects has been conceived and developed here on several closely inter-
woven levels of possible reading, starting from their distribution through the galleries and the flow of visitors
through what we could call a mixed display configuration.
Gallery 1 is evocatively dedicated to the myth of Orpheus and the display here communicates with its
surrounding in a very special way [fig. 1]. The museum is installed in the eighteenth-century Bolognese pa-
lazzo Riario-Aldini-Sanguinetti, and the room where the display starts, decorated “alla boschereccia” by
Vincenzo Martinelli (1737–1807), used to be a dining room. On the wall is shown a classical landscape that
includes distant architecture, and in the space are additionally placed several statues, including a composi-
tion showing Ceres and Bacchus by the young Palagio Palagi (1777–1860). On display in this room are mu-
sical documents related to the first performance of Claudio Monteverdi’s Favola di Orfeo (Mantua, 1607)
including the original libretto by Alessandro Striggio, a copy of the Harmonicorum libri by Marin Marsenne,
two chromatic harps and two cornetti all from the last quarter of the sixteenth century.

© 2014 Research Center for Music Iconography CUNY 281

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Enrico Tabellini, Communication Strategies of the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna

1.Gallery no. 1 dedicated to the myth of Orpheus.

Galleries 2 & 3 represent a kind of pilgrimage to Italian musical sites among which Bologna was an
important center due to the residency there of Padre Marini. Within a grand encyclopedic tradition, he
amassed an extensive library and significant gallery of portraits of composers, theorists and practitioners of
music, and from him comes the nucleus of museum’s musical collections. One gallery is therefore dedicated
to him, and the other to his students and visitors, such as Johann Christian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, who saw him during their Gran Tours of Italy.
On display here are two of Padre Martini’s most important works: Storia della musica (Bologna, 1757–
1781) and Saggio fondamentale di pratica del contrappunto fugato (Bologna, 1774–1775), in addition to some of
his immense and esteemed collection of musical documents. The physical presence of his library is recorded
in a double painting by Giuseppe Maria Crespi (1665-1747) that the tradition wants to be originally placed
on the door of one of his bookshelf [fig. 5].
Gallery 4 is dedicated to music theory, which was one of Padre Martini’s particular areas of interest.
Three volumes of Franchino Gaffurio’s Theorica musice (Milan, 1492) tell the story of the rediscovery of
ancient Greek and Latin musical writings that revolutionized fifteenth-century music. Here are on display
editions of ancient writers such as Euclid and Aristides Quintilianus, alongside Marcus Meibom’s Antiquae
musicae auctores (Amsterdam, 1682), Gioseffo Zarlino’s Le istitutioni armoniche (Venice, 1558), Vincenzo Ga-
lilei’s Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna (Florence, 1581), Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis
(Rome, 1650), René Descartes’s Musicae compendium (Amsterdam, 1683), and the documents about one of the
most noted musical querelle in history of music, Giovanni Maria Artusi’s Delle imperfettioni della moderna
musica (Venice, 1600–1603) and Claudio Monteverdi’s Quinto libro dei madrigali (1605).

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 Music in Art XXXIX/1–2 (2014)

2. Gallery no. 5 displaying books and instruments from the 16th and 17th centuries.

The presentation is completed with a series of portraits of music theorists and some musical instruments
made in the second half of the sixteenth century, which document the experiments concerning the diatonic,
chromatic and enharmonic genres of ancient Greek music. A striking example is here the clavemusicum
omnitonum constructed by Vito Trasuntino (fl. 1560–1606) following the model of the lost archicembalo
described by Nicola Vicentino (1555). In addition to usual white keys, the instrument has on two manuals
black keys divided into two parts so that a distinction could be made between sharp and flat notes inserted
between C/D, D/E, F/G and G/A. Its four octaves have 31 keys each permitting producing intervals of less
than a semitone as well as the highest number of natural major thirds possible.
Gallery 5 to 9 demonstrate history of opera, instruments and music publishing [figs. 2–4]. History of opera
starts in the exhibition with Euridice by Rinuccini/Peri/Caccini, continues with the eighteenth-century works
and portraits by Vivaldi, Handel, Farinelli, Cimarosa, Paisiello, Jommelli, nineteenth-century opera with Rossini,
Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Wagner, and concludes with the early-twentieth-century composers.
In these galleries are also displayed several objects from the collection of Padre Martini, including his
annotated music editions, choral books and early printed books with music. On display is also the first edition
of the only preserved copy of Ottaviano Petrucci’s pioneered Harmonice musices odhecaton A (1501).
The high status that music had achieved in this period is demonstrated by the high-quality instruments,
such as lutes made in Venice, Bologna and Padua by Hans Frei, Magnus Tieffenbrucker, Magno Steger, Matteo
Sellas and Michele Harton, the viola da gamba by Antonio Ciciliano, the flauto polifonico from the collection
of Manfredo Settala (1600–1680). From the more recent periods the museum has selected a rare bass clarinet
of Adolphe Sax, a heckelphone from 1900, a piano by Erard (1811, which may have belonged to Paolina Borghese),
and another by Pleyel (1844) that belonged to Gioachino Rossini.

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Enrico Tabellini, Communication Strategies of the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna

3. Gallery no. 6 dedicated to Farinelli and 18th-century Italian opera.

Throughout the museum, each display case contains a group of documents that vary in nature (instru-
ments, books, portraits) but concern the same topic, and in some galleries are built-in drawers with materials
displayed on rotation in order to continually engage visitors with different materials, considering that the
museum has in its library a collection of over 110,000 items.
Far from being a purely esthetic or didactic museological vision, the curators believe that the true value
of a visit to this museum (and to any other museum) lies in becoming aware and enjoy these hidden aspects
of collections, as well as in generating the countless possible relationships between objects and the unique
skills and experience of each visitor. To achieve such a level of complexity and depth, it is indispensable for
the museum to intelligently adopt suitable strategies of mediation between audiences and the collections.
The curators have analyzed what happens when this mediation is lacking (or rather, when a museum
assumes a direct rapport between the visitor and the content on display) reading the visitors’ comments left
in the guestbook at the museum exit and received by mail or in social networks, like Facebook and
Tripadvisor. Most of the comments can be grouped to three categories: beautiful building, beautiful paintings
and instruments, and excellent installation. These comments are since the opening of the museum frequently
accompanied by the observation, “unfortunately there is no music” what highlights the importance of the
mediation between visitors and the collection.
Many visitors expect to enter a gallery and “hear the sound of the displayed instruments”, regardless
that a music museum is not necessarily a museum of musical instruments and their sounds. For the Bologna
museum the focus is to display its bibliographic collection, which is particularly strong with sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century printed music. The other significant group of objects on the display are the portraits of
musicians from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries assembled by Padre Martini and his successors,

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 Music in Art XXXIX/1–2 (2014)

4. Gallery no. 7 with a display of Rossini’s works and 19th-century Italian opera.

which was considered the sancta sanctorum of music already during his time. The group of instruments at
the Bologna museum is certainly interesting, but unquestionably far inferior in terms of scope and rarity to
some other museums of instruments. For these reasons, piping music into the galleries as a background
sound could potentially have the “muzak effect”, whereby the music becomes nothing more than a pleasant
backdrop rather than the focus of attention.
This sort of music presentation can be experienced at the Haus der Musik in Vienna, where in the galleries
dedicated to the history of music are played compositions by the Viennese composers in a loop. They are selected
from various repertoires, such as chamber music, solo pieces, “second movements”, and they are not identified
for the visitors. Such a selection was made with a purpose to provide a relaxing background for visitors, and
these galleries demonstrate a great attention and musical sensitivity on the part of the curators.
In our view, listening to music per se does not inherently ensure the raising of any sort of new awareness
or interest. It is indicative that practically no museums of music utilize piping of music into its galleries, but
rather all of them have experimented with systems like headphones allowing visitors to listen sound of a specific
instrument (Brussels), infrared sensors triggering recorded audio or video files as visitors approach (Paris),
or a menu of recorded pieces that a visitor can select from an audio guide posted in the display case (Barcelona).
Over the last twenty years museums have adopted a myriad of audio or video guides, which are con-
stantly changing as new technologies become available. However, they all follow the prevailing model of
the frontal classroom lecture, where visitors press a button in order to listen an introduction to the gallery
or performance of individual works. This approach is indicative of how, at the curatorial level, it is unani-
mously considered preferable to allow visitors to decide when and for how long they wish to listen to music
or information. But a fundamental problem remains: these choices tend to deflect attention from the collec-

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Enrico Tabellini, Communication Strategies of the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna

5. Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Two painted doors of a library shelf

showing musical books (1720s–30s). Oil on canvas, 165.5 × 78 (left
door), 165.5 × 75.5 cm (right door). Bologna, Museo Internazio-
nale e Biblioteca della Musica, B33134 & B33135.

tion as a whole to the individual exhibit (“Listen to the music of this famous composer in front of his por-
trait!”, “Listen to the sound this instrument makes!”). The audio/video guide thus turns out to be a useful
tool in creating a satisfying mediation only in front of special object such as for example at the Bologna mu-
seum the Harmonice musices odhecaton A (1501), where the visitor can hear from the audio guide the infor-
mation that this is the first printed score in music history and the museum owns its only preserved copy.
When the interest is not so much focused on a single piece but on a broader vision about the collection
as a whole, or on the underlying logic of the installation, on the reciprocal relationships between the various
items on display, between the collections and the history of music, between the history of music and other
arts, between documents and music as both an artistic and social activity perceived in the context in which
it was produced, consumed, and transformed, the recorded music or a minute of explanation accompanied
by music of the visitor’s choice is not sufficient. The mere listening to music is in many cases of secondary
importance even, and perhaps above all, in a museum of music. We therefore asked ourselves how to recon-
cile the particular status of music with the need to foster interest in it through our collections.
AWE AND EMOTION AS MEANS OF MEDIATION. In 2010 the Bologna museum undertook, in collaboration
with the architects of Diverserighestudio in Bologna, an analysis of the challenges of the current museum
installation. The museum is housed in the historic palazzo Riario-Aldini-Sanguinetti, a sumptuous sixteenth-
century patrician residence, restructured in the early nineteenth century. The display cases are made entirely
of glass, without any metal support, which makes it possible to fully appreciate not only the collections, but
also the splendid frescoes from the Napoleonic era. Paradoxically, one of the disadvantages which curators
must come to terms every day is precisely the extreme elegance of these cases, which tend to overshadow
their content.

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 Music in Art XXXIX/1–2 (2014)

6. A visitor in front of Crespi’s painting, once apparently placed on the door of Padre Mar-
tini’s bookshelf, leafing through a laser-projected book shown in the painting.

Along with strictly museological aspects, the study includes architectural, technological and semiotic
analyses aimed at underlying logic of the installation which has to demonstrate, for example, that the mate-
rial on display is only a tip of the iceberg of the museum’s collections. The new display should concurrently
present a less didactic and linear relationship between visiting the museum and the experience of listening
to music. The aim is not to merely bring music inside the exhibition, but to make it its true focus. The chosen
medium for the presentation of music is a combination of ambient and inductory speakers, interactive video
lasers, holograms and holocubes. Beyond the powerful symbolic relationship between these technologies and
the very nature of music are other advantages. For example, these technologies are non-invasive and they
are adaptable to any situation, requiring neither obtrusive structures nor heat sources. They allow a range
of uses and combinations with the existing installation, without disturbing it. Finally, they are respectful of
the integrity of the documents, enabling the use of laser video projectors directly in the display cases [fig. 6].
The mediation apparatus will therefore not be juxtaposed to the visitor’s itinerary, like in most museums
with traditional panels or video totems, but overlapping and mixing with the objects.

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Enrico Tabellini, Communication Strategies of the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna

7. The original model of the Teatro Comunale in Bologna (1755), built by Antonio Galli Bibiena in 1757 and
inaugurated in 1763, animated with a virtual laser projection. Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della
Musica, 725/2007.

This mix of technologies allows an extreme versatility, particularly regarding the diversification of com-
municational objectives. Regardless of the type of mediation between visitor and collection (displayed or not)
that one wishes to deploy, the visitor is not limited to a purely informative approach, and can even hybridize
with other dimensions, thus allowing the exploration of other areas normally excluded from communication
strategies in museums. Taking advantage of these new opportunities, the study for the museum of music has
focused on three aspects of communication, of which the following are examples (the titles are taken from
comments left by visitors in the museum book).
1. “I Never Imagined Such an Encyclopedic Undertaking Could Exist.” The visitor can directly interact
with a virtual reproduction of the late sixteenth-century chromatic harp on the display, playing the strings
projected on the glass of the display case. Another laser projection will reproduce a guide for playing the
instrument from the Harmonicorum libri by Marin Mersenne (1636), also displayed in the exhibition.
The interactive laser holography projected on the glass will allow the visitor to consult the Storia della
musica by Padre Martini leafing virtually through the book. A localized audio recording will concurrently
explain the importance of the research that went into creaton of the collection, not to mention all the trading
and bartering between musicians, historians, theorists, patrons and antiquities dealers all over Europe.
By opening the drawers which are already used in the current installation, the visitor can access the hid-
den patrimony spread among the galleries as a metaphor of the enormous archive of musical documents (and
inaccessible to the public) from which the displayed material is drawn.
2. ”A Wonderful Surprise!” From an audio installation beneath the portico on the street across from the
museum, the casual passerby can become aware of the museum and its existence. The original model of the
Teatro Comunale in Bologna made in 1755 will be animated within by a virtual laser projection, showing a
performance of an eighteenth-century opera [fig. 7]. In the gallery dedicated to the nineteenth-century opera,
a video installation will reproduce the figure of Rossini in a domestic setting, as he is composing Il barbiere
di Siviglia (the original autograph of the opera score is on display at the museum).

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 Music in Art XXXIX/1–2 (2014)

3. “Music is the Key to Our Emotions.” Laser projections above the keyboard of the clavemusicum
omnitonum show two overlapping interactive keyboards, one tempered and the other enharmonic, allowing
the visitor to perceive the difference between pure and tempered sound, and by extension between the theory
and practice of music. Atop the display case of seventeenth-century instruments, the visitor can listen to their
sound, and by positioning himself at the intersection of the individual sound streams he can hear them as
an ensemble.
BEYOND THE GUIDED TOUR: THE EDUCATIONAL PROJECT AS MEDIATION STRATEGY. The second media-
tion project concerns the contradiction that a music museum must put on display art of the past for the
viewers of the present. The peculiar nature of this heritage on display requires a search for appropriate edu-
cational strategies, both for the visitor not equipped with a knowledge about music and, even more so, for
children to whom the importance of the collection is even less obvious and must be cultivated through cog-
nitive and affective processes of appropriation capable of creating mechanisms of identification with the
objects. Through the project of the education department “Putting Music in Play”, the museum is reconsider-
ing the forms through which its educational efforts are traditionally expressed and establishes the example
provided by active pedagogies.
The first step in this transition process of the display was to abandon the usual formula of the guided
visit in which the guide in a delirium of erudition is spewing forth an endless list of names, dates, and anec-
dotes. The guided visit is not the most appropriate pedagogical medium for examining the countless argu-
ments related to the collection. Putting it purely in terms of quantitative computation, as the museum has
nine galleries, in a guided tour of two hours every room would get no more than fifteen minutes of time in
which the guide would have to present a historical and cultural context and explain each individual exhibit.
This approach alone cannot provide the basis of any serious educative plan, and it would result at the best
in a superficial show of anecdotes and curiosities. In conversations with visitors we have found out that the
collection faces another difficult communication obstacle: not only that its historical depth makes under-
standing of the individual pieces complicated, but as music education in the Italian school curriculum is more
formal than substantial, visitors are often unfamiliar with the musical language and they lack appropriate
tools to decode its underlying structures.
The field of art education tout court has instruments that refer to widely available concepts such as form,
color, light, distribution and articulation of space. The same cannot be said of music, which does not take
advantage of targeted training to clarify the parameters that constitute its language and make them more
widely known. Children (and adults as well, though perhaps less likely to admit it) reveal an enormous
confusion about concepts such as rhythm, harmony and melody. They do not understand what constitutes
a musical composition, and communicating in Italian language they sometimes also confuse the term “opera”
as musical theater with the generic term for a work of art. In short, there is a general lack of any attention to
training in music, such that music remains a language held hostage by specialists.
The preschool education makes extensive use of non-verbal languages and music is among them defini-
tely considered a privileged channel of expression for toddlers, but the used tools and methodologies —when
special training is lacking—are often naive and devoid of specific reflection. In Italian primary schools the
law requires two hours of music education per week. Teachers, however, experience a sense of inadequacy
in dealing with music education and increasingly often resort—economic resources permitting— to the help
of outside experts. Qualified teachers should finally be available at the lower secondary school level, but the
idea of a workshop approach to music seems to fade in favor of an exclusively historical, cultural and rather
notional methodology that does not always effectively address the cultural needs of a teenager. The museum
therefore finds itself having to fill these general gaps in basic education, as well as taking responsibility for
the promotion of music literacy that is obviously inadequately provided in school. As such, training is not
just for the benefit of children but also for their teachers who become familiar with techniques and learning
strategies of music instruction, gradually acquiring the ability to handle the material in the classroom and
sometimes even venture into structuring their own self-managed musical curriculum. For these reasons, mu-
seum’s outreach strategies are based on the principles of active teaching, namely, (1) accessibility (removing
terminological or conceptual obstacles to comprehension), (2) actualization (translating music into images

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Enrico Tabellini, Communication Strategies of the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna

8. Laser keyboard projected above the clavemusicum omnitonum, allowing the visitor to
perceive the difference between pure and tempered sound.

relatable through experience), and (3) empowerment (providing direct experience, acquiring skills, or
building confidence).
The museum therefore decided to offer a series of visits that allow people to understand the collection
from different viewpoints, including the display as a hypertext from which to draw pertinent material related
to any given theme. In this way, every time one returns to the museum, the level of appropriation and knowledge
becomes deeper. By doing this, the museum completes its basic mission—conservation and communica-
tion—becoming at the same time a center for the dissemination of musical heritage, a true “house of music”.
Toward this end, the museum is expanding a range of approaches to visits suited for children and teens.
Its educational proposals are each year communicated through a printed brochure distributed to schools of
all levels, and also through the museum website. After consulting the proposals divided by age group, teach-
ers contact the project operators and schedule one or more visits organized in thematic cycles. Participation
is very high: in 2013 the museum offered visits (mostly free and custom designed) to 650 groups of all levels
of education, coming from Bologna and the region, for a total of about 15,000 children.
The varied range of proposals to choose from can be grouped into different thematic areas, all of which
follow a well-defined path “approach” to the collections: practical approaches to education in several meet-
ings devoted to artistic languages, conducted not only in the museum but also in schools (narrative music
teaching methods for early childhood; sound manipulation workshops; improvisation and empirical compo-
sition; dance and body percussion workshops; vocal techniques and choral singing; music courses for fami-
lies). These may be grouped as follows:
Thematic courses and performance laboratories inspired by the collection (group dance; instrument
construction; music and images)
Courses conducted in the museum galleries (In search of lost history; The emperor’s nightingale)
Courses focused on the collection (Treasure hunt; Who wants to be a musician? Pythagoras’s
workshop)
Thematic courses focused on the collection (the so-called “Visite Sonate”; tours through the museum
accompanied by musicians who play the instruments on display; from voice, violin, lute and

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 Music in Art XXXIX/1–2 (2014)

harp to cornet, flute, oboe and Baroque trumpet)

Specialized thematic courses on music (in-depth looks at musical theater; the library collection; con-
temporary music)
Specialized thematic courses on history (Mozart in Bologna; The Grand Tour; Bologna’s musical sites;
Rossini in Bologna; Wagner and Verdi)
Courses designed in collaboration with teachers
The initial laboratories include all the activities relative to making music. Participants sing, play or make
instruments, dance, listen to and analyze music in order to produce performances and theatrical shows.
In subsequent years, these musical experiences are enriched with the participation in workshops and the-
matic laboratories at the museum, thereby establishing an initial contact, both creative and engaging, with
the cultural heritage represented by the collection. It is only at the conclusion of this process of “approach-
ing” music that participants enter the collection by way of in-depth musical and thematic tours and “Visite
Sonate”, discovering the museum’s holdings in the company of live musicians, who are no longer distant
repositories of abstract musical knowledge, but true colleagues with whom participants can share the lan-
guage, skills and musical experience acquired along the path of musical education. In this way, the museum
is not only concerned with communicating this specific collection, but with helping to expand people’s view
of the wider musical culture of which the collection is an example and an integral part.
In the empirical composition laboratories, for example, the focus is museum’s collections of portraits of
famous musicians and composers as well as the documentary evidence of their artistic production in the form
of scores. For children, however, it is not immediately clear what it means to compose with sounds. With a
toolbox consisting mainly of percussion instruments, the basic parameters of music (pitch, timbre, intensity,
rhythm, pulse, meter, accents, density and depletion of the sound space, articulation of form) are clearly defined.
These parameters—experienced through instruments that do not pose technical difficulties —are used for
conducting and composition activities. In this way the composition process—which in the last analysis and
its most concise form means making decisions about the organization of sound material—is experienced firsthand.
The quality of musical listening also changes because in the encounter with musical production and with such
diversified repertoires lie the same criteria for the organization of sound material that children will try to identify,
and that will serve as proper tools for the analysis and reconstruction of the compositional process.
The same holds true for the instrument-building laboratories, which clarify fundamental principles of
acoustic physics through the artisanal activity of “making things that make sound”. Instruments like the cla-
vemusicum omnitonum in Gallery 4 benefits from mundane explanations (in any case useless to a child) if
combined with a series of parallel activities on the behavior of vibrating bodies—the relationship between
the length and caliber of the strings and pitch, the function of the soundboard, bridge, chains and so on—that
achieve the goal of preparing the ground for the recognition of these principles in more complex applications.
The collection thus functions as an initial stimulus or point of arrival, and in this way gradually reveals its
secrets: the educational project does not end in a single visit, but it is rather designed to last for years, to
accompany and support musical education of children over a longer period of time. The educational rela-
tionship with a class, then, can last an entire school cycle and can be designed in collaboration with the teach-
ers, starting from the particular cultural goals of a given group and from the possibility of integrating specific
musical knowledge into the general school curriculum, even creating shows and performances that become
containers in which to bring together both the workshop experience from the museum and the multidisci-
plinary work carried out in class during the year.
The presence of music in a museum of music is not to be understood only as an acoustic fact. The museum
must be understood as a multidisciplinary laboratory where artistic languages are brought together, where
mutual influences and contaminations are highlighted, where art objects are contemplated as historical facts,
connected to the history of taste and thought and, upon completion of an educational journey that necessarily
involves practical application, where the visitor can experience the creative process of making art.

Thanks to Linda Tesauro and Luca Bernard of

the Education Department at the Museo della Musica

291

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