Vermillion, South Dakota
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 13,500 American, European, and non-Western instruments from virtually all cultures and historical periods, are the most inclusive anywhere.
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The NMM is the only place in the world where one can find two 18th-century grand pianos with the type of action conceived by the piano's inventor, Bartolomeo Cristofori. One, built in 1767 by Manuel Antunes of Lisbon, is the earliest signed and dated piano by a Portugese maker; the other, built by Louis Bas in Villeneuve lès Avignon in 1781, is the earliest extant French grand piano.
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Other extraordinary keyboards include a Neapolitan virginal (ca. 1520), three 17th-century Flemish harpsichords (two by Andreas Ruckers), 17th- and 18th-century English, German, Portugese, and French harpsichords, and German and Swedish clavichords.
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The NMM's holdings of 17th- and 18th-century Dutch woodwind instruments by such makers as Richard Haka, Hendrik Richters, Philip Borkens, Abraham van Aardenberg, Jan Juriaensz van Heerde, and Jan Steenbergen, are unique outside of The Netherlands.
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The NMM's holdings by 17th- and 18th-century Nürnberg makers, including members of the Denner, Ehe, Haas, Oberlender, and Steinmetz families, as well as Ernst Busch, Paul Hainlein, Johann Benedikt Gahn, Johann Carl Kodisch, Leonhard Maussiel, Michael Nagel, and Paulus Schmidt, are unique outside of Germany.
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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 unaltered condition, one of only two Stradivari guitars to be seen in a museum setting, and one of only two Stradivari mandolins known to survive.
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A group of 450 instruments made in the late-19th/early-20th centuries by the C. G. Conn Company in Elkhart, Indiana, is a resource unparalleled anywhere for historical research about a major American industry and the American band movement.
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The sum of these groups of American, Dutch, German, and Italian instruments is to be found nowhere else.
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The 1994 addition of the John Powers Saxophone Collection (Aspen, Colorado) and the Cecil Leeson Saxophone Collection and Archives (transferred from Ball State University) make the NMM the preeminent center for studying the history of the saxophone.
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The 1996 addition of the Rosario Mazzeo (Carmel, California) and the Bill Maynard (Massapequa, New York) Clarinet Collections make the NMM the preeminent center for studying the clarinet.
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The 1999 addition of the Joe & Joella Utley (Spartanburg, South Carolina) Collection and the establishment of the Utley Institute for Brass Studies makes the NMM the preeminent center for studying the history of brass instruments.
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The Alan Bates Harmonica Collection and Archives (Wilmington, Delaware), received as a gift in 2000, is second in size and importance only to the Harmonika Museum in Trossingen, Germany.
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The 2005 gift of the D'Angelico, D'Aquisto, Gudelsky Workshop is the focus of a major exhibition, "Great American Guitars" (by D'Angelico, D'Aquisto, Fender, Gibson, Martin, and Stromberg).
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The NMM is housed in a fully accessible, climate-controlled building, where 850 representative instruments are exhibited in nine galleries. There is a concert hall for performing and recording on historical instruments, study areas, a library, and a conservation laboratory.
Learn more at the National Music Museum site.
