See the Human Body Morph Into Musical Instruments From Around the World at a New Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

A belly turns into a drum, hands mold into percussion tools and a face adorns a brass bell in this anatomical art history show

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

June 10, 2026 3:41 p.m.

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A new exhibition that opened this week at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art puts 4,000 years of human music-making through an art history X-ray of sorts, scanning the anatomy of musical instruments for signs of humanity.

The new show, “Musical Bodies,” asks how and why so many instruments played through time and across the globe, from the hurdy-gurdy to the ehecachichtli Aztec “death whistle,” serve not just as tools of expression, but also as physical extensions and representations of the body.

“‘Musical Bodies’ first formed in my mind as a deceptively simple question: Why are so many instruments shaped and decorated like the human body?” Bradley Strauchen-Scherer, curator in the department of musical instruments at the museum, says in a statement. “The quest for an answer has become an exploration of humanity through the lens of instruments and music. We find ourselves represented in these instruments because, for much of our history, music has been central to who we are and what we do.”

Many of the roughly 130 works on display interrogate the music-body connection in their unique artistic forms. Sometimes quite literally, as with a pair of clappers shaped like arms and hands, sculpted from hippopotamus ivory, from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom era. According to the museum, clappers were among the earliest percussive instruments used in ancient Egypt.

Other instruments incorporate body parts into their design, too. A brass bell from the Lower Niger River region, made in either the 19th or 20th centuries, prominently displays a carved human face. An early 20th-century percussion instrument, standing more than three feet tall and made in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, slopes beneath the drumhead into a pair of breasts and belly. And a 19th-century dhodro banam, also known as a santal fiddle, made in eastern India, stands in the shape of a smiling person, hands on his or her hips.

“Often we think about music as a very specialist thing,” Strauchen-Scherer tells the New York Times’ Joshua Barone. “Sometimes it gets branded as being elitist. But when we look at why people make music across time, it’s in our DNA. It’s absolutely fundamental to human survival.”

One recurring theme of “Musical Bodies” is the role instruments play in romance and sexuality. A 19th-century woodblock print from Japan, depicting a woman playing a shakuhachi—a Japanese flute—was more suggestive, and certainly more provocative at the time, than may initially register to the modern eye. According to a museum description of the artwork, the image has “an erotic subtext.”

“In Japanese culture, as in western culture until fairly recently, it was considered taboo and very sexually suggestive for women to play instruments like flutes and recorders, anything that goes in your mouth,” Strauchen-Scherer tells the Guardian’s Veronica Esposito.

The exhibition includes more modern instruments, too, including several played for large audiences. There’s Prince’s purple Love Symbol guitar, which merges the Venus and Mars female and male symbols, and a PianoArc circular piano played at Lady Gaga concerts.

“This multisensory exhibition is the first to explore—through remarkable instruments, objects and works of art—the fascinating ways in which sound, musical objects and the human form have been in conversation for millennia,” Max Hollein, the Met’s CEO, says in a statement.

“Musical Bodies” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through September 27, 2026.

Christian Thorsberg | Read More

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.