Musical Instruments Museum

This guide to the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels opens with an 1877 auction where a bankrupt Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone, saw his personal instrument collection sold off to creditors. It follows Victor-Charles Mahillon, curator of a brand-new museum at the Brussels Conservatory, who bought pieces from Sax's own workshop and from the rival makers Sax had spent his career competing against. You're standing inside the old Old England department store, a glass and iron shell raised in 1899 and wrapped in wrought-iron vines.