Ringve Museum (Musical Instruments)

Ringve Museum is Norway's national museum for music and musical instruments, with collections from all over the world. It is located in the historic Ringve Farm in Trondheim. Ringve Farm was the childhood home of the Danish-Norwegian nobleman, Peter Tordenskjold. It is situated in a park on the Lade peninsula just outside Trondheim with a view over the Trondheimsfjord, the park forming botanical gardens run by NTNU (the Norwegian University of Science and Technology). The first house on the site was built in 1521, but the current group of buildings dates from the 1740s onwards.

It houses a collection of historical musical instruments, which now numbers around 1,500 instruments, alongside other artifacts associated with music – pictures, recordings. The museum is based on the private collection of founder Victoria Bachke and was opened to the public in 1952. Jon Voigt (1928-1997) succeeded Victoria Bachke as director in 1963 and continued until 1997. Over the years many famous musicians visited Ringve, including Artur Schnabel, Lilly Krauss, Ignaz Friedman, Percy Grainger and Kirsten Flagstad, as well as the artist, Edvard Munch.

The collections on display in the Barn are divided in two parts: Instruments mainly associated with western classical and popular music over four centuries. A Kirkman harpsichord of 1767, a Erberle viola d’amore of 1755, a five-octave Stein piano of 1783, a soprano saxophone by Sax (son) of 1907, along wide early electronic instruments and a 1948 jukebox. Folk instruments from all around the world, including a Runebomme (a type of Sami drum), a Tibetan zang-dang (horn), a nadomo (arched harp) from Congo and hardanger fiddles