Ghana Music Instruments Collection

The Ghana Music Instrument Collection is a collection of music instruments from Ghana. The collection is housed at Grinnel College in the U.S. It features 18 items namely the bakoma, akukuadwo, dawuro-kete, dawuro, gondze, axatse, donno, kwadum and many others.

The music instruments are objects in the inventory of a college music department and are used for studio instruction, by ensembles, and in classroom teaching. They were not acquired as part of a coherent, planned collection building project, but come together as a collection.

The project originated in 1999 as a collaboration between Professor Roger Vetter and Dr. David Berk, who at the time was the Curricular Technology Specialist (CTS) for the Fine Arts at Grinnell College.

The institute has a searchable database that is intended to provide its users with visual, sonic, and written information about a broad sampling of acoustic music instruments of both Western and non-Western origins. Its primary audience is envisioned as students in undergraduate general education music courses (Western music history/appreciation classes, introductory ethnomusicology/’world music’ courses).