The December issue of the Smithsonian magazine has a great foreword by the Institution's Secretary. Almost poetry. Here are some excerpts:

"Quiet can be a blessing, but unnatural silence is something else again. In the storeroom of the National Museum of American History where we keep a portion of the Smithsonian's vast musical instruments collection, the stillness goes against the grain. Though all the objects in the room were made for noise and use, they've been tamed by the discipline of a museum. Trumpets, oboes, flutes and harmonicas lie like specimines in drawers, as bugs and birds do in other great collections of the Institution. Violins, guitars, banjos and fat horns sit in cabinets. Cellos in their cases rest against the wall. Not a sound from the lot, and yet the mind can't help but hear each one.

"Some of the items in the Smithsonian's collection are astonishingly beautiful (stringed instruments by the Italian master Antonio Stradivari), some are barely functional (an impossibly heavy banjo made from a World War II German artillery shell, with bullet casings for tuning pegs) ...

"Of the estimated 1100 instruments Stradivari made, only 11 survivors feature ornamentation, with black lacquer tracings and ivory inlays. Four of those – a quartet of such exquisite physical beauty that they qualify as sculpted art- are in our collection…

"On display, that is, when they're not at work. For the instruments are never shown to greater advantage or kept in better health than when they are played."