Prague's proud musical heritage rings through the city's concert halls almost every night of the week. But for a more leisurely tour of Central European music history, there's nothing like a couple hours at the National Museum's Czech Museum of Music, which has a remarkable collection of priceless musical instruments spanning four centuries.

This relatively new museum's permanent exhibition, "Man, Instrument, Music," opened less than a year ago in a former state archival building that was once the Church of St. Magdalene, a Baroque-style church and monastery. In the 17th century, it housed one of the largest organs in Prague. So, in a sense, the building has come full circle.

First-time visitors may be disappointed by the lack of music while viewing the temporary exhibits on the ground floor. After all, what is a music exhibit without sound? However, once you trek up to the first floor, the real exhibition begins — in the present. Czech artist and rock musician Milan Cais (from the Tata Bojs) has installed a rotating egg-shaped sound sculpture, surrounded by film snippets of old musicals and videos of Czech rock concerts. There are also curious electric guitars made in Czechoslovakia from the 1950s to '80s, and other experimental instruments.

The next room is dedicated to avant-garde music of the first half of the 20th century. The unique pianos on display were created to aid the ideas of innovative, atonal-minded composers — a Cubist-shaped August Förster, a couple of classical-looking, electronic Neo-Bechsteins (both from the 1930s) and a one-sixth tone August Förster harmonium.

Relics of the past

From this point on, touring the museum is like taking a trip back in time. Each room also offers a listening station with headphones, so you can hear musical selections played on the instruments on display.

The first exhibition room jumps abruptly to the Classical and early Romantic eras, represented by pianofortes, pyramid (upright) pianos, fretted clavichords, harpsichords and a rare Viennese grand piano (by Johann Jacob Seydel). Other remarkable instruments include a square piano (1793), two early-19th-century Giraffe pianos, named for their long-necked vertical facades in the shape of a clef, and an orphica (a piano shaped like a proto-guitar).

Continuing back through time, the next room is devoted to church music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, displaying organs and other polyphonic wind instruments (keyboards linked to pipes and wind bellows). The collection includes portable positive organs, a harmonium with two enormous green pedals (1856), a mélophone, an 18th- or 19th-century processional positive organ that resembles a crude, homemade functionalist box, and a glorious centerpiece positive organ.

Across the hallway, the display continues with woodwind instruments of the Renaissance. The most precious of these are from a south Bohemian collection of the Rožmberk Court Ensemble, including a rare regál (a type of reed organ) and an extended great bass crumhorn, which in another context could be mistaken for an elegant, modern art sculpture. This section also includes curved cornets, lutes and bass recorders.

Three entire rooms are dedicated to string instruments like violas de gamba and violins. Among them are delicate instruments by Tomáš Hulínský, the first ethnic Czech and Prague native counted among the important instrument-makers from this region, and Jan Oldřich Eberle, a local instrument-maker from the 18th century. His violins and violas d'amour (violas of love) are considered among the most beautiful in all of violin-making history, because of their ornate frames and the sculptured heads on the top of the instruments' necks, which include angelic faces, cherubs, composers, and even a blindfolded child.

Bagpipes and hurdy-gurdys

The next section showcases harps made in Bohemia during the 18th and 19th centuries. The decorative columns of these predominantly golden instruments glisten like mini-statues.

A vast display of woodwind and brass instruments follows, highlighted by unusual creations like the serpent (ca. 1800), basset horns and bassoons shaped like elegant, musical piping systems from the late 1700s and early 1800s. Two Prague masters of woodwind instruments are showcased: J. Fridrich, from the time of Bach, and Josef Šediva (1853–1915), who created unique double-belled horns called šediphones. Another unique instrument in this section is by Václav František Červený, who invented the Trintonikon, a heavy, vertically serpentine bass.

Perhaps the first instrument invented by man, the drum, is not displayed until one of the last sections of the exhibit. In this room there are not only kettle drums, but 18th-century tambourines, a gong and a Chinese hat (a rattle on a stick), various accordions and a glass harmonica, in which the sound is produced by rubbing the glass.

Instruments associated with early Central European folk music, such as ocarinas (fat little flutes), the trumsheit (a one- or two-stringed guitar played in the 18th and 19th centuries), zithers (crude little box guitars), bagpipes and hurdy-gurdys (all common in Central Europe) are displayed beside even rarer instruments from other regions, like the Swedish nyckelharpa (a crude violin).

The final room features mechanical instruments such as a portable pipe-barrel organ and a polyphone. There is also an unforgettable music box figurine of a black boy singing and playing a banjo, from 19th-century France. This caricature of an African boy in a Renaissance-era traveling musician's costume closes the exhibition with a weird twist.