Three Centuries of Music in Lund: The Instrument Collection of Akademiska Kapellet

For more than 280 years, Lund University has had its own orchestra – Akademiska kapellet – in which students make music under professional direction. The orchestra performs at ceremonies and celebrations, gives its own concerts, and serves as a network for music-loving students and, at times, for other residents of Lund.

Less well known is that the ensemble’s leaders early on began to assemble a substantial collection of musical instruments dating from the seventeenth century onwards. Some instruments were acquired for the students to play, others for their historical interest. For more than a century, most of the collection has been kept in storage at the Swedish Museum of Performing Arts in Stockholm, the museum Kulturen in Lund, and the Danish Music Museum in Copenhagen.

In a new exhibition, Odeum and the Historical Museum at Lund University now present around thirty particularly notable instruments. Not since the nineteenth century have so many of the collection’s rarities been shown in public.

Here you will find flutes and oboes, an exquisite shawm from Amsterdam, chalumeaux, clarinets and bassoons, a curious cello from Ängelholm and a half-eaten viola, an ivory cornett, a natural trumpet from Nuremberg and a horn from Karlskrona, cavalry timpani with three hundred years of history, the orchestra’s first metronome, purchased in 1831, an oboe da caccia that Johann Sebastian Bach may once have held in his hands, a curious musical innovation from Copenhagen in the 1940s – and more.

Together, the instruments tell stories of ceremonial duties, concerts and chamber music from the eighteenth century onwards, music as craft and as fine art, tears shed while playing works by Johannes Brahms, differing views on how Baroque music should be performed, and centuries of collecting carried out largely out of sight.

Welcome to an exhibition where you will see – and hear – vivid traces of Lund’s and Europe’s musical history.

The exhibition opens on 18 February 2026 at the Historical Museum at Lund University. 

Warm thanks to the LMK Foundation and the Birgit and Sven Håkan Ohlsson Foundation for the generous support that has made this exhibition possible.

Admission: SEK 50 (regular). Free admission for students/children/LU employees. Read more about prices and discounts at the Historical Museum here.

Opening hours: Wednesday–Sunday: 12:00–16:00. Monday–Tuesday: closed

Exhibition period: from 18 February 2026 to approx. 15 February 2027

For current information, visit the Historical Museum's website.

Don't miss the two concerts held in conjunction with the exhibition at the Historical Museum:

Bach's Suites & Viole Gambs Book | 21 February, at 16:30 | Historical Museum

Eco Nordica! | 16 May, 16:30 | Historical Museum

See the entire Odeum event series (in Swedish)