Sunday, 10 March 2019 Scottsdale

We arrived at the Musical Instrument Museum shortly after 9:30 AM. I found that “MIM” is a bit if a misnomer. It was much broader and would more correctly be called a music museum. It was divided into galleries that more or less corresponded to the continents. Within each gallery there were displays for each country of the region. Each display, of course, had a selection of musical instruments native to that country. (Who knew that pretty much every country in Europe had some kind of bag pipes?) But each one also had a TV screen. When you enter the museum, you are issued a head set. When you approach the TV screen, the head set picks up the audio which accompanies what is on the screen. Each screen had an average of four videos showing some traditional and modern music from the region using some of the instruments in the display. They also often included singing and folk dancing. The European exhibit often included pieces from classical masters. The North American exhibit included several different genres, such as rock, country, bluegrass, jazz, native music, and many more. There was also a gallery dedicated to specific artists from around the world, including Randy Bachman from Canada. It was all very, very interesting and much more than I expected. I would recommend it highly to anyone visiting Phoenix, especially if you are interested in music and especially if you don’t have children.

By lunch time we had only finished the European and North American galleries. We decided to check out the on-site cafeteria. Again, it was surprisingly good – much more than you would expect. 

After lunch we toured the rest of the museum until about 4 PM. From there we went to a nearby mall for a stop at the Target store. Then it was back to the condo for a light supper and visiting on the patio around the gas fire. Later we walked to a nearby shopping district and toured around. Being a Sunday, most of the stores, except restaurants, were closed, but we were only window shopping anyway as most of the stores were high end places (including a Tesla store) where we would not shop anyway.