Met Museum's 'Musical Bodies' Blurs Humans and Instruments

Met Museum's Musical Bodies exhibition examines the blurry line between humans and instruments. Opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Friday, the show gathers paintings, prints, fashion, sculpture and instruments spanning thousands of years to explore the human condition through music. Curator Bradley Strauchen-Scherer notes that many artifacts reference the body in form or decoration, inviting visitors to rethink music as a universal, fundamental human impulse. The display emphasizes beatboxing and features videos that reveal the voice as instrument, showing non-lyrical textures and percussive sounds that expand our ideas of sound and identity. It asks visitors to reconsider what music can be.