Royal Visit to the Bate Collection

The Bate Collection was delighted to welcome His Majesty King Charles on 10 July 2026, as part of his visit to the University of Oxford to mark the opening of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.

For the Bate, the occasion provided an opportunity to share some of the Collection’s historic musical instruments with The King and to highlight the ways in which instruments can open up new perspectives on music, history and material culture.

Dr Emanuela Vai, Curator and Head of the Bate Collection, welcomed His Majesty and introduced him to a selection of instruments from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The instruments represented several different families, including wind, string and percussion instruments, offering a small glimpse of the extraordinary range of objects held by the Collection.

Each instrument has its own story. Its construction can tell us about the technologies and materials available to its maker; its design can reveal changing approaches to musical performance; and evidence of its use can connect it to the musicians and communities who played and heard it. Taken together, instruments such as these provide a rich material record of musical life across time.

The King was also shown a rare autograph manuscript of Johann Sebastian Bach from the Bodleian Libraries. The manuscript of Auf Christi Himmelfahrt Allein is one of only four autograph manuscripts by Bach in the United Kingdom. Seen alongside the Bate instruments, it offered a particularly evocative encounter with the material history of music, bringing together the objects through which music was made and the manuscripts through which it was recorded.

Visits such as this provide an opportunity to reflect on why collections of musical instruments matter.

The Bate Collection preserves instruments from different periods, places and musical traditions, allowing them to be studied as objects of musical, artistic, technological and social history. They support teaching and research at Oxford, while also enabling visitors to encounter the physical evidence of musical cultures that might otherwise survive only through written or recorded accounts.