Permanent collection

Tours

Whether alone or with your family, with your classmates or your friends, come visit the exceptional collections at the Musée de la Musique: tour on your own with a free audio-guide, (available in French and English), or take a guided tour on your own or with a group.

A special audio tour for children makes visiting the museum fun. It’s available in French and English, and was created with the support of EHA Foundation and France Musique.

A highlight of any visit is an encounter with a musician, giving visitors a unique chance to listen to and talk about music from around the world. Children can follow up their visit with a workshop.

Our lecturers are all musicians, historians, musicologists or ethno-musicologists. They adapt their tours to their audience and are committed to teaching to share their passion for music, as are all the artists performing at the Musée.

Individual Adult Rates

Individual tour
with audio-guide available (in French and English)
Full price: €8
Discount: 20% off: €6,40 / 30% off: €5,60 € / 50% off: €5

Guided tour
discovery tour, musical tour
Full price: €10
Discount: 20% off: €8 / 30% off: €7 / 50% off: €4

More about discounts

Adult Group Rates

> Adult groups (cultural associations, groups of friends, works councils, tour operators, etc.)

With guide
discovery tour, musical tour:
Full price: €220* -
Discount: €154*
* Price includes museum admission.

Without guide
for groups of 10 or more people, museum admission is reduced by 20%, to €5.60 per person.
All group tours (guided or not) must be reserved in advance.

Don’t queue!
Purchase and print your museum tickets on line

Discover the museum

From the Renaissance to today, this tour takes you on a journey around the world, and through the history of music. A guide presents the jewels of our collections: a Stradivarius violin, the Érard piano played by Franz Liszt, Django Reinhardt’s guitar, and an extremely rare Thai piphat mon orchestra.

Beginning 3 March
Tour time: 1h30

From romanticism to the contemporary era

From the French Revolution to today, this tour covers a full two-hundred years of intense musical activity, marked by continuing traditions but also by breaks. With many audio-visual documents, this tour brings together the evolution of the musical language and the development of instruments and instrument-making techniques, from the piano to the computer, from Chopin to Boulez.

From 21 October to 28 June
Tour time: 1h30

Instruments from around the world

The area dedicated to the music from around the world contains a rich collection of instruments from major world cultures: the Arab world, Africa, Asia, Oceania, American indigenous music, etc. With strong ties to founding myths and popular rites, these instruments bear witness to the fundamental role played by music in all civilisations.

From 21 October to 28 June
Tour time: 1h30

Instruments and traditions from around the world – tour and workshop

To appreciate the wealth of musical traditions, this tour continues your exploration of the museum’s collections with a workshop in which you get a chance to handle some instruments. Listen, observe and experiment with the Indian sitar, African harps and the Japanese flute, for a unique opportunity to travel around the world.

From 21 October to 28 June
Tour time: 2h

The birth of opera

This tour restores the ties between vocal and instrumental music. You will discover the many uses of the voice “on stage”, from Monteverdi’s Orfeo to Gluck’s. As both a performance and a musical genre, the opera is intimately linked to the evolution of societies, with its roots in mythologies or stories taking place at a king’s court, and deals with topics close to the daily lives of its contemporaries.

Beginning 3 March
Tour time: 1h30

From baroque to the Age of Enlightenment

During the baroque period, links between instrument makers and musicians encouraged encounters and created rivalries which marked the evolution of musical tastes and know-how across Europe. This tour explains the exchanges between cultural areas (Cremona, Venice, Antwerp, Paris, etc.) and traces the evolution of major musical genres, from Monteverdi’s Orfeo to Mozart’s Parisian Symphony.

Beginning 3 March
Tour time: 1h30

Guided tours for groups are conducted from Tuesday to Friday, and Saturday mornings, from 21 October 2008 to 28 June 2009.
Some tours are available in English, German, Italian and Spanish.
For information and reservations, call 01 44 84 44 84

Don’t queue!
Purchase and print your museum tickets on line

Youth rates

Are you under 18?

• > Free tours with audio guide: no charge
• > Individual tours: no charge
• > Guided tours: €6.00
• > Wednesday cycle/annual: €155.00
• > Wednesday cycle/quarterly: €60.00

Click here for more youth rates!

Don’t queue!
Purchase and print your museum tickets on line

Opening hours

Tuesday to Saturday, 12.00 PM to 6.00 PM
Sunday from 10.00 AM to 6.00 PM
Closed Monday
Ticket counters close 45 minutes prior to closing.
Special hours Wednesday 22, Thursday 23 and Tuesday 28 October until 8.00 PM.
Closed 25 December 2008, 1st January and 1st May 2009.

Guides

To prepare or complete your visit, museum guides for adults or families present a number of different tours of our collections. Other works like the museum’s more specialised notebooks, or the “Contes du Musée” children’s collection explore instruments in our collection from different angles. A series of CD recordings of our collection’s instruments is also available at our on-line bookshop.

Renovation

When the renovation works will be completed in late March 2009, the museum will have a more dynamic presentation, with a new sound tour including the many recordings of our instruments and the presentation of 40 short documentary films (produced by Camera Lucida) placing the works in their broader cultural context.

Cultural events around the permanent collections

As a cross between living music and the protection of historic collections, the museum’s vocation is to encourage communication between the public, historians, musicians and instrument makers. It is committed to providing an evolving and open process, by comparing music and fine arts, heritage and practice, and repertoire knowledge and instrument studies.

Colloquiums, forums, study days

Our forums, study days and colloquiums are an opportunity to share knowledge in a variety of fields: music history, analysis, instrumental practice and organology.
Some of these events subsequently appear in publications.

The colloquiums have a multi-disciplinary goal and feature expert instrument makers, teachers, music specialists and contemporary art historians. They feature research topics related to the museum’s collections and exhibits, or develop topics initially covered at study days.

Musique et globalisation	Saturday 11 Oct. 08 / 9:00
Wanda Landowska	04/03/2009 to 05/03/2009

The forums target a broad audience and discuss certain of our programme topics in depth through debates, conferences, audiovisual documents and musical events.

La Révolution française	Saturday 20 Sept. 08 / 3.00 PM
L'épopée du Ramayana	Saturday 22 Nov. 08 / 3.00 PM
"Suivez le thème"	Saturday 6 Dec. 08 / 3.00 PM
La naissance des avant-gardes	Saturday 28 Feb. 09 / 3.00 PM
Forum Giacinto Scelsi	Saturday 21 Mar. 09 / 3.00 PM
Forum Pascal Dusapin	Saturday 28 Mar. 09 / 3.00 PM
Paris sous la monarchie	Saturday 2 May 09 / 3.00 PM

Study days bring together professionals and are an opportunity to review current research conducted by the museum’s laboratory and conservation department.

Patrimoine musical du XXe siècle	Monday 6 Apr. 09 / 10.00 AM
Dater l'instrument de musique	Saturday 6 June 09 / 9.30 AM

Concerts with museum instruments

The Musée de la Musique is committed to conservation and to knowledge of musical instruments. It does so through meetings with the public at the museum, but also at concerts scheduled at the Amphitheatre as part of the musical season. Well-known and up-and-coming artists bring them to life.

Some concerts also use facsimiles created at the museum’s request when original instruments are no longer in playing condition or would require dangerous restorations.

1711 Érard piano
1749/1784 Goujon/Swanen harpsichord	Thursday 18 September 08
1814 Joseph Brodmann piano	Saturday 20 September 08 / 5.30 PM
Facsimile of the 1691 Tibaut de Toulouse harpsichord, reconstitution of the 1703 Carlo Grimaldi harpsichord	Sunday 28 September 08
1910 Gaveau piano, 1703 Carlo Grimaldi piano	Saturday 28 February 09 / 5.30 PM
Late 18th century Longman § Broderip harpsichord, 1703 Carlo Grimaldi harpsichord	Wednesday 1 October 08 / 8.00 PM
1646/1780 Andreas Ruckers/Pascal Taskin harpsichord	Wednesday 4 March 09 / 8.00 PM
1923 Gaveau harpsichord	Wednesday 4 March 09 / 8.00 PM
1646/1780 Andreas Ruckers/Pascal Taskin harpsichord	Thursday 5 March 09 / 8.00 PM
1761 Jean Henry Hemsch harpsichord	Saturday 16 May 09 / 8.00 PM
1761 Jean Henry Hemsch harpsichord	Sunday 17 May 09 / 4.30 PM
1842 Pleyel piano	Saturday 2 May 09 / 5.30 PM

Recorded concerts from previous seasons are available on line.
See recorded concerts

Concerts-promenades

On certain weekends throughout the year, the museum echoes with the rare sounds of instruments from our collections or of facsimiles. As you stroll through the museum, you can enjoy a number of mini-concerts, then talk with the musicians. This is a unique opportunity, providing you and your children an original and fun way to learn about music history.

Autour de Serge Gainsbourg	25/10/2008 to 26/10/2008
Contes mandingues	14/02/2009 to 15/02/2009
Etudiants au Musée	07/03/2009 to 08/03/2009
Fête de la musique	Sunday 21 June 09 at 2.30 PM

Story and Music Weekend

Contes mandingues

14/02/2009 to 15/02/2009