Lost Music

A massive cache of musical treasures that’s grown to include a fragile harp-piano, the pioneering Moog synthesizer and the theremin used for “The Green Hornet’’ radio show has been shuffled over the years from a theater to an unheated barn and now languish, rarely seen or heard, in a Michigan storage vault.

Spanning centuries and continents, the instruments worth at least $25 million by their chief caretaker’s estimate are packed and stacked in an out-of-the-way storage room with water-stained ceilings. It’s hardly the environment envisioned for them when Detroit businessman Frederick Stearns gave the University of Michigan the base of the collection a century ago with instructions that the instruments be exhibited — not invisible.

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“The only way I can characterize it is Tut’s Tomb, because it’s been so forgotten about for so many years,’’ said Steven Ball, director of the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments. “The collection has been in a holding pattern for 112 years. This is a national treasure — it deserves the dignity of either being properly housed … or to be dispersed in such a way that it could be.’’

Such “orphan’’ collections pose problems for many academic institutions, despite the prestige that comes with owning them. Kris Anderson, director of the University of Washington’s Jacob Lawrence Gallery, said he discovered a repository of nearly 1,000 forgotten paintings and other artwork spanning more than a century. He found out about the collection because its main basement storage space was being reused.

Anderson, a vice president with the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, said numerous campuses have collections, such as costumes at his school and slide rules within the University of Colorado’s math department, that aren’t part of universities’ museums and risk being discarded. Doing so would be an “irreversible decision to devalue … the history of the institution itself,’’ he said in a recent paper.

“Resources are tighter for everybody,’’ he said. “When the pie shrinks, administrators need to balance the needs of a lot of different constituencies. … You have to be willing to look for advocates in places you’d never before.’’

That was the case with “The Gross Clinic,’’ a Thomas Eakins painting that Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University agreed to sell in 2006 after 129 years of ownership to a museum being built in Arkansas by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. heiress Alice Walton.