AT A GLANCE
Why go?
At the heart of Nashville's Music Row, where Division Street meets 16th Avenue North in a tree-ringed traffic circle, Musica rises about forty feet into the air—a swirling ring of nine dancing figures cast in bronze. Alan LeQuire's monumental work is the largest bronze figurative sculpture group in the United States, and it has become the visual signature of the neighborhood that built the city's music business.↗↗↗
"Dance is the physical expression of music," LeQuire wrote of the piece, intended to feel "simple, exuberant and celebratory." The nine nude figures—each more than twice life-size—leap from a base of raw local limestone boulders, four more floating above them in the center, crowned by a woman raising a tambourine. It is a roadside monument rather than a walk-through attraction, best admired in a few memorable minutes as you circle through the neighborhood that inspired it.↗↗
A tribute to Music Row
Musica was never meant to honor one genre. Its title comes from the Latin for the "arts of the Muses," and the sculptor designed it as an image of creative inspiration itself—an idea bursting spontaneously into the open. Set in the roundabout now named Buddy Killen Circle, it anchors the area where record labels, studios and publishing houses made Nashville "Music City," representing all forms of music, past, present and future, as a kind of visual icon for the whole city.
