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If you happen to
be visiting Brussels (an excellent place despite what
they tell us on Top Gear) I highly recommend a trip
to the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM). The stunningly
beautiful Art Nouveau building in which it's housed
used to be a very posh department store back in the
1920s - undoubtedly the Harrods of its day. The
museum's five floors are home to just about every
kind of musical instrument imaginable, from the earliest
flutes and percussion to some fairly bizarre mechanical
keyboard concoctions, and even some relatively
recent electronic instruments. One of the museum's
innovations is a wireless headphone system - just
walk up to an instrument, and recorded examples begin
to play automatically. It's also quite sobering
to see things in a museum that I used to own - including
one that I still do!
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