The Sibelius Museum in Turku is the most comprehensive music museum in Finland. Our aim is to bring Finnish music history to life. Many different genres of music live within our museum.

Here you can experience music and music history in many ways. The museum consists of an exhibition section, a concert hall, instrument collections and a diverse music archive. Our exhibition work consists of presentations of the museum’s instrument collection, temporary exhibitions, and various collections representing different musical cultures, not to mention Finland’s most famous composer, Jean Sibelius. Our museum occasionally hosts audiovisual exhibitions, too. The Sibelius Museum is part of the Åbo Akademi University Foundation.

The Sibelius Museum can be considered to have been formed in 1926, when Otto Andersson became Åbo Akademi University’s first professor of musicology and folk poetry. Andersson started collecting material on musicology and music history for the seminar library, including, for example, sheet music, instruments, letters and photographs. This is how the “Åbo Akademi University Music History Collection” came to be. The museum went by this name until the year 1949.

At the turn of 1948–1949, professor Andersson asked Jean Sibelius for permission to give the music history collection the name Sibelius Museum. The proposition met with the composer’s approval, and the museum bears this name to this day.