National Music Museum

The National Music Museum: America's Shrine to Music & Center for Study of the History of Musical Instruments (NMM) is a musical instrument museum in Vermillion, South Dakota, United States. It was founded in 1973 on the campus of the University of South Dakota. The NMM is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums and is recognized as "A Landmark of American Music" by the National Music Council.

The NMM's renowned collections, which include more than 15,000 American, European, and non-Western instruments from all cultures and historical periods, are among the world's most inclusive. They include many of the earliest, best preserved, and historically most important instruments known to survive. The quality and scope of the NMM has earned it international recognition.

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 NMM was established around the private musical-instrument collection, numbering approximately 2500 instruments, of Arne B. Larson. Larson's son, Dr. André P. Larson, was the founding director of the museum until his retirement in 2011. The second (and current) director is Dr. Cleveland Johnson.

The NMM is housed in a building (originally the University's library, built in 1910 with a grant from Andrew Carnegie's library building program), where over 1,000 representative instruments are exhibited in nine galleries. The Arne B. Larson Concert Hall has superb acoustics and provides a perfect setting for performing and recording music played on original instruments of various historical periods and cultural milieu. There is a specialized library, extensive study-storage areas, and a laboratory for the conservation and restoration of the instruments. 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.

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