MEXICO CITY.- The National Museum of Anthropology has opened Music of Mexico and the World, a temporary exhibition bringing together 358 musical instruments from Mexico, the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia.
Organized by the National Institute of Anthropology and History, through its National Coordination of Museums and Exhibitions, the exhibition opened on July 17, 2026, in the museum’s Temporary Exhibitions Gallery. Admission is free.
Curated by Mexican musician, ethnomusicologist and researcher Juan Guillermo Contreras Arias, the exhibition examines the many forms, uses and meanings of musical instruments, while highlighting the parallels and differences that connect musical traditions across cultures.
Mexico’s Secretary of Culture, Claudia Curiel de Icaza, said the exhibition offers a broader understanding of heritage by focusing not only on the objects themselves, but also on the knowledge and practices associated with them.
“Each instrument brings together history, technique, creativity and memory,” Curiel de Icaza said. “Bringing this heritage closer to the public broadens our understanding of cultural diversity and reminds us that music has always been a way of building community and transmitting knowledge.”
The exhibition is divided into six thematic sections: Music and Musical Instruments, The Emergence of Musical Instruments, Collecting Musical Instruments, A Journey Through Music, From Toys to Instruments, and Construction and Restoration.
“I want to show as many instruments as possible, especially those capable of communicating something,” Contreras Arias said.
The display includes idiophones, which produce sound through the vibration of their own bodies when struck, shaken, scraped or rubbed; membranophones, which depend on the vibration of a stretched membrane; chordophones, which use vibrating strings; and aerophones, which generate sound through moving columns of air.
Among the instruments from Mexico are a cylindrical tlapanhuehuetl decorated with low-relief carvings; a clay k’ayom, or Lacandon ritual drum; shawms from Jalisco, Tlaxcala, Oaxaca and Texcoco; and harps associated with Totonac, Tenek, Nahua, Jarocho and Zinacantán communities.
The exhibition also includes Jarocho, Mixtec and Huastec jaranas, along with Yaqui jirukiam scrapers and ténabaris, percussion instruments made from butterfly cocoons.
Objects from elsewhere in the Americas include tambourines from Canada and Chile, bull-horn trumpets from Peru and Ecuador, Colombian flutes and charangos from Peru and Bolivia.
The African section features steel drums from the Maghreb, trumpets made from gazelle horns in southern Africa and a Nigerian zither constructed from plant stalks joined together in the form of a raft.
European instruments include Galician, Scottish and Catalan bagpipes, German harmonicas, an Italian concertina, fado guitars, a Russian balalaika, a French tenor banjo and a Greek bouzouki.
From Asia, the exhibition presents an Indian sarod, Korean and Japanese zithers known as the gayageum and koto, and a saung gauk, or arched harp, from Myanmar.
Most of the objects date from the 19th and 20th centuries. Their materials range from reed, cork, bone, wood, hide and shell to glass, Bakelite, nylon and various metals and alloys.
The instruments represent only a small portion of Contreras Arias’s collection, which contains around 5,000 pieces. He began assembling it more than 50 years ago while training as a musician, ethnomusicologist, instrument maker and composer.
“I discovered an entire world of instruments,” he said. “I began with Mexico, traveling through every state to see what existed, and I realized it was a bottomless barrel. Later, as I traveled through the Americas, Europe and elsewhere, the collection continued to grow.”
Some instruments were acquired during his travels, while others entered the collection through donations and personal gifts. Among those who contributed pieces were the Indian musicians Ravi Shankar and Aashish Khan, known for their association with the sitar and sarod.
Now on view at the National Museum of Anthropology, Music of Mexico and the World places Mexican instruments alongside examples from other regions, revealing how communities separated by geography developed distinct musical traditions while often relying on similar materials, structures and ways of producing sound.
