The Music Museum is thoroughly reorganizing its collections

World music, exhibition on disco, Ravel’s Bolero, Pierre Boulez, dance, the Music Museum displays its great ambitions for 2025.

The collection of the Music Museum in Paris will be presented in a new light in May 2025 to give their full place to non-European instruments and world music, the Philharmonie announced on Tuesday, whose next season will also be marked with an exhibition on disco. From May 17, 2025, the public will be able to discover, at the museum which adjoins the concert hall in eastern Paris, a tour “transformed” permanent collections.

“From the Chinese mouth organ to the European accordion”, “from the history of the banjo connecting Africa and the Americas to the global destiny of the violin”, the layout, never seen again since the opening in 1997, now aims to “foster the reconnection of musical heritages across the world and explore the dialogues they have historically maintained”, according to the Philharmonie.

“Disco, I’m coming out”

The institution will also present “Disco, I’m coming out”, intended to highlight the “cultural revolution that shook dancefloors around the world”. Another will reveal the making of a monumental work, Ravel’s Boléro, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of its author. Like every year, the most prestigious orchestras and soloists will jostle in the Great Pierre Boulez Hall of the Philharmonie, inaugurated in 2015 and which has become a benchmark in terms of acoustics.

The centenary of the birth of the composer Pierre Boulez will notably be the occasion for concerts and conferences. Three festivals are also scheduled, including Days Off (with Air, in particular) and Jazz in La Villette, while musical events will highlight Armenia, the Caribbean and Mali (and in particular the singer Fatoumata Diawara). Dance will be present with the show Ritual, which will bring together the Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the choreographer Benjamin Millepied, but also with productions by choreographers Robyn Orlin and Peter Sellars. Movies Umbrellas of Cherbourg by Jacques Demy or The dictator by Chaplin are on the program of the film concerts.

In 2023, the Philharmonie had an occupancy rate of 89% (almost the pre-Covid level, 92% in 2019).