Museo degli Strumenti Musicali

Inside Sforza Castle, a collection of about nine hundred instruments traces music-making from Renaissance keyboards to the tape machines of the avant-garde. Among the treasures are a double virginal by Ioannes Ruckers, a viola by Giovanni Granzino, and the apparatus of the RAI Studio di Fonologia, where Berio and Maderna shaped the birth of Italian electronic music.

Why it matters

Most instrument museums stop at craftsmanship; this one also crosses into composition history. Its roughly nine hundred instruments, from European and extra-European traditions, are rated among the most important collections in Italy and Europe, and they document not only how instruments were built but how they were used: the keyboard world of the seventeenth-century player, the workshop of the Milanese wind-maker, and finally the studio where the sound of the twentieth century was manufactured. The Studio di Fonologia section gives the museum a claim few peers can match, preserving the material infrastructure of a laboratory whose output changed postwar music.

What to notice

Three objects anchor the collection. The double virginal signed by the Antwerp maker Ioannes Ruckers shows the peak of Flemish keyboard building, its case and scaling a lesson in Renaissance engineering. The viola by Giovanni Granzino and the oboe by Giovanni Maria Anciuti represent Lombard and Venetian lutherie at the moment when the modern orchestra was forming. Then the exhibition turns unexpected: a focus on the Studio di Fonologia Musicale della Rai di Milano, established thanks to Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna, active from 1955 to 1983, displays oscillators, tape recorders and studio furniture that produced experimental electronic works and film scores of the era. Wind, plucked and keyboard instruments from European and extra-European traditions fill the intermediate rooms, illustrating the range of materials and decoration and the museum's progression from artisanal tradition to the avant-garde.

Context and history

The museum grew out of civic collecting and private bequests assembled in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and was installed within the castle's museum system, as part of the City of Milan's network of castle museums. Its strengths mirror Milan's own musical history: the city that hosted the premiere of Nabucco and the postwar birth of electronic music keeps both ends of that story under one roof. The RAI phonology studio, founded with the decisive involvement of Berio and Maderna, operated for nearly three decades before its equipment passed into the civic collection, preserving the equipment and history of Italy's electronic-music laboratory.