Laurence Libin

Advisory Board

Curator, Musical Instruments / Metropolitan Museum of Art

Laurence Libin, emeritus curator of musical instruments at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is editor-in-chief of the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments (Oxford University Press, 2014), honorary curator of Steinway & Sons, and past president of the Organ Historical Society. He was educated at the universities of Chicago and London (King’s College) and studied harpsichord with Paul Maynard and Thurston Dart. A prolific scholar and author in the field of organology and a leading advocate of historic preservation, he has taught in the graduate schools of Columbia University and New York University and lectures internationally, from Russia to Mexico City to Japan. In addition to about 200 publications, he has produced two nationally broadcast radio series and is responsible for over a dozen recordings from the Metropolitan Museum’s instrument collection. He is a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and recipient of the Anthony Baines Memorial Prize of the Galpin Society (UK), the Curt Sachs Award of the American Musical Instrument Society, a Likhachov Foundation fellowship (Russia) and numerous other awards and grants.