Musical Instrument Museum: 7,500 Instruments From 200 Countries, Headphones On, Thirty Minutes From Old Town

What it is

The Musical Instrument Museum is a 200,000-square-foot building on Mayo Boulevard in north Phoenix, beside the Mayo Clinic, that displays more than 7,500 musical instruments from more than 200 countries and territories, drawn from a collection of some 15,000. It opened in April 2010 and cost more than $250 million, nearly all of it from one man: Robert J. Ulrich, the chairman and chief executive of Target, who visited the instrument museum in Brussels with his friend Marc Felix and decided that Phoenix should have the global version. He built it with a Target executive’s eye for how people move through a space, and it shows.

The mechanism is the headphones. Every visitor gets a wireless headset at the door, and as you step up to each exhibit a screen plays film of the instrument being played in its home country, the audio fading in and out as you move. Upstairs are the five geographic galleries, Africa and the Middle East, Asia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America and the United States and Canada, organized country by country, so that you can walk from a Malian kora to a Norwegian hardanger fiddle to a Bolivian brass band in ten minutes. Downstairs are the Artist Gallery (John Lennon’s “Imagine” Steinway, Elvis, Johnny Cash, Taylor Swift), the Experience Gallery where everything is meant to be hit, the Mechanical Music Gallery of player pianos and orchestrions, a conservation lab behind glass, Café Allegro, and the 299-seat MIM Music Theater.

Why leave Scottsdale for it

Because Scottsdale’s museums are good and small, and this is the one institution in the Valley that stands with the country’s best. Our museums note sends every visitor with a car here, and locals have been doing the same since it opened. It is also the answer to the hot afternoon, the rainy day and the grandparents.

The practical version

Thirty minutes from Old Town up the 101 to Tatum, fifteen from Kierland. Open daily nine to five. Free parking. A three-level admission that covers the whole building; the Music Theater is separate. Half a day minimum; lunch at Café Allegro; a concert if the calendar lines up.

When to go

Weekday mornings at opening, before the school groups reach the second floor. Summer afternoons, when the building is the best use of 110 degrees within an hour of Scottsdale; MIM runs its own summer programs and the galleries are quieter than in the high season. Winter weekends are busy, with the Experience Gallery a scrum by eleven; go upstairs first. Concert nights, year-round: the MIM Music Theater books touring jazz, world, folk, blues and classical acts several nights a week, and the room is small enough that there are no bad seats. Our live music note treats it as a Scottsdale venue in all but address.

The galleries, in order of worth

1. The geographic galleries. The point of the place. Pick two or three regions and do them properly rather than racing all five; Africa and Latin America have the best film, Asia the most instruments, Europe the most familiar.
2. The Artist Gallery. Lennon’s upright Steinway from the “Imagine” sessions, under its own light; the Elvis, Cash, Orbison and Puente cases; a Taylor Swift guitar and microphone for the kids.
3. The Experience Gallery. Gongs, drums, a harp, a theremin; everything playable, everyone playing. Twenty minutes with children, five without.
4. The Mechanical Music Gallery. The orchestrions and player pianos are demonstrated on a schedule posted at the door; catch one.
5. The conservation lab. A window onto the workbench where instruments are repaired; watch for a minute.

With kids

MIM is the best museum in the Valley for a child, by a distance. The headphones make the galleries self-guided, the Experience Gallery is a licensed free-for-all, and the United States gallery has enough rock and roll to hold a teenager. Our kids note pairs it with the Western Spirit museum in Old Town as the two museum days of a family week.

The neighborhood

You are in north Phoenix at the Tatum line, next to the Mayo Clinic campus. The Desert Ridge Marketplace and High Street are five minutes north for dinner; the Kierland Quarter is fifteen minutes east.

The story

Bob Ulrich ran Target through the years that turned it from a regional discounter into a design-conscious national brand, and he collected African art and instruments on the side. On a trip to Brussels with the art dealer Marc Felix he visited that city’s Musical Instruments Museum, which arranges instruments by orchestra section, and came away with a different idea: a museum that arranged them by where they came from, so that a visitor would see what every culture on earth had done with wood, skin, brass and string. He picked Phoenix, where he had a house, bought a site on Mayo Boulevard across from the clinic, and spent more than $250 million on a long sandstone-colored building across the road from the clinic. Curators fanned out to collect from more than 200 countries and territories. It opened in April 2010, in the trough of the recession, and was an immediate hit.

What makes it work is the Target discipline. The headphone system was a technical gamble that removed every label-reading bottleneck; the galleries were laid out with sightlines and seating; the theater was built to concert-hall standards at a size, 299 seats, that could book artists who would never fill a Phoenix arena. The collection has grown past 15,000 objects, a STEM gallery has joined the upstairs floor, and the museum has become one of the most-visited in metro Phoenix, with a calendar of concerts, festivals and school programs that make it more of a cultural center than a collection.

The Scottsdale connection

MIM sits a mile west of the Scottsdale line and draws most of its visitors from the resorts on the other side of it. Scottsdale’s own museum row in Old Town, Western Spirit and SMoCA, covers the West and the contemporary; MIM covers the rest of the planet, and the three together are the museum week. Kierland’s hotels put it on every concierge list, and the museum’s theater has become a regular stop for the acts our live music note follows.

Getting there

From Old Town, the 101 north to Tatum Boulevard, south a half mile to Mayo Boulevard, east to the museum; about thirty minutes. From Kierland, west on Greenway-Hayden Loop or Bell Road to Tatum, then south; fifteen minutes. Parking is free and generous. A rideshare from the Camelback corridor runs forty minutes and is worth it for a concert night; our getting around note has the figures.