Proper showcasing of the instruments means that only 10 to 15 percent of the collection can be displayed at any given time. So, the collection moved from Woolsey Hall to its current location at 15 Hillhouse Avenue, the former home of an Alpha Delta Phi fraternity chapter.Ĭompared to other Yale museums, the YCMI is pretty small. Impressed by Yale’s Steinert Collection, Skinner’s heirs-including two nephews who were Yale alumni-agreed to turn over Belle’s instruments on one condition: that the university find a sufficiently museum-like setting in which to showcase them. “She tended to collect fine, highly decorated instruments-and she had a number of auction houses seeking these items for her at all times,” Thompson says. Then, in 1960, the family of Holyoke, Massachusetts-based heiress and philanthropist Belle Skinner came calling, offering Yale what one of her admirers once called a “collection of superlatives.” She had filled the music room of her home in Holyoke with priceless acquisitions like a three-quarter size 1736 violin by Antonio Stradivari, completed when the master was 92. For more than half a century, these instruments resided in the rotunda of Woolsey Hall. Steinert repaid that kindness by bequeathing his treasured collection of historic instruments- largely keyboards-to the university in 1900. Yale’s powers-that-be graciously allowed this new symphony to rehearse on its premises. He also established the Steinert Family Orchestra, made up of friends and Yale University students at first, and later renamed the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. Steinert & Sons-that was the first in New England to sell Steinway & Sons pianos. Ten years later, he moved to New Haven and opened a music store-M. Morris Steinert, a Bavarian immigrant who moved to New York City in 1850, began his stateside musical career as a violinist in a traveling minstrel troupe. Between its string, wind and keyboard holdings, the YCMI encompasses five centuries of passionate craftsmanship, from a circa-1550 viol made by Giovanni Battista Ciciliano to harpsichords fashioned during the instrument’s late 20th-century revival by renowned American artisans John Challis and William Hyman.Ĭomposed of nearly 1,000 instruments, including an extensive selection of “non-western” items that go way back in time, the YCMI is “one of the most comprehensive in the world,” says curator Susan E.

B y the time Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night posited music as the “food of love” in the early 1600s, some elements of the Yale University Collection of Musical Instruments (YCMI) already existed.

Yale music keys