National Music Museum
Founded in 1973 on the campus of The University of South Dakota in Vermillion, the National Music Museum (NMM) & Center for Study of the History of Musical Instruments is one of the great institutions of its kind in the world. Its renowned collections, which include more than 15,000 American, European, and non-Western instruments from virtually all cultures and historical periods, are the most inclusive anywhere.
The NMM is fully accredited by the American Association of Museums in Washington, D.C., and is recognized as "A Landmark of American Music" by the National Music Council.
The NMM was founded as a partnership between The University of South Dakota, which provides staff and facilities for preservation, teaching, and research, and the Board of Trustees of the NMM, a non-profit, 501(c)(3) corporation that is responsible for acquisitions, public exhibiting, and programming. The Board of Trustees is totally dependent upon support from NMM members, individuals, corporations, foundations, and governmental units.
The NMM's meteoric rise to world-class status has attracted international attention, and each year the NMM attracts thousands of visitors who make the pilgrimage to Vermillion from all 50 states and many other countries.
Highlights of the Collections...
The NMM is the only place in the world where one can find two 18th-century grand pianos with the specific type of action conceived by the piano's inventor, Bartolomeo Cristofori. One of these, pictured here, and built in 1767 by Manuel Antunes of Lisbon, is the earliest signed and dated piano by a maker native to Portugal; the other, built by Louis Bas in Villeneuve les Avignon in 1781, is the earliest extant French grand piano.
A group of more than 500 instruments made in the late-19th/early-20th centuries by the C. G. Conn Company of Elkhart, Indiana, is a resource unparalleled anywhere for historical research about a major American industry and the American band movement.
The NMM's holdings of brass, woodwind, and stringed instruments by 17th- and 18th-century Nürnberg craftsmen, including members of the Haas and Oberlender families, Ernst Busch, Paul Hainlein, and Jacob Denner, is unique outside of Germany.
The NMM's holdings of 17th- and 18th-century Dutch woodwind instruments by such makers as Richard Haka (represented here by a soprano recorder made ca. 1690), Hendrik Richters, Philip Borkens, and Abraham van Aardenberg is unique outside of The Netherlands.
The Witten-Rawlins Collection of early Italian stringed instruments crafted by Andrea Guarneri, Antonio Stradivari, three generations of the Amati family, and others by far surpasses any in Italy. Included are two of only three, 17th-century Cremonese stringed instruments preserved in the world today in unaltered condition, represented here by the NMM's spectacular tenor viola by Andrea Guarneri, made in 1664.
Most significantly, the sum of these groups of American, Dutch, German, and Italian instruments (not to mention the many other such important groups in the NMM's collections) is to be found nowhere else in the world.
Archives...
Finally, the NMM has rich holdings of related objects and archival materials, such as the unequaled Salabue-Fiorini-De Wit-Hermann-Witten-Rawlins Collection of 650 violin makers' labels.
There are violin-making tools and Baroque fittings, early harpsichord and fortepiano tuning hammers, and 1,000 brass instrument mouthpieces from virtually every turn-of-the-century manufacturer.
The NMM's Musical Instrument Manufacturers Archive (MIMA) includes more than 18,000 trade catalogs, price lists, periodicals, photographs, and related ephemera documenting more than 2,000 musical instrument manufacturers and distributors (with an emphasis on American manufacturers) to support organological research and cataloging. It is unparalleled elsewhere.
The NMM's specialized research library includes more than 5,000 volumes, as well as more than 20,000 periodical issues to support organological research.
The Facilities...
The NMM is housed in a 20,000 square-foot, climate-controlled building, where 1,100 representative instruments are exhibited in nine beautiful galleries, such as the Abell Keyboard Gallery, pictured below.
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