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National Music Museum
The National Music Museum: America's Shrine to
Music & Center for Study of the History of Musical Instruments (NMM)
is located in Vermillion, South Dakota, and was begun in 1973 on the
campus of the University of South Dakota, housing a marvelous
musical instrument museum. It is full accredited by the AAM and
considered a "Landmark of American Music" by the National Music
Council. The famous collections are well known all over the world,
containing over 13,500 European, non-Western and American
instruments from all historical eras and cultures, believed to be
the most inclusive in the entire world. The collection contains some
of the earliest, most well preserved and historically prominent
instruments believed to have survived. Because of its magnificent
quality and range, it is certainly one of the most recognized. The
museum was started as a partnership between the university, that
gives staff and room for the preservation, research and teaching;
and the Board of Trustees of the museum, a nonprofit, that acquires,
displays and programs the collections. This board entirely depends
on the support of the museum members, corporations, foundations,
individuals and government agencies. It is contained in an
accessible, climate-controlled environment, that houses 9 galleries
and displays 850 representative instruments. The acoustics in the
Arne B. Larson Concert Hall are magnificent and is the perfect
setting for playing and recording the wonderful music played on the
original instruments of different periods of history and their
cultural milieu. The museum also contains a specialized library, a
lab for the conservation and restoration of the instruments, as well
as huge study-storage galleries. It also contains 1000 brass
instrument mouthpieces from just about every turn-of-the-century
maker, violin-making tools, baroque fittings, and early harpsichord
and fortepiano tuning hammers. There are numerous other exquisite
holdings of related relics and archival materials, like the
Salabue-Fiorini-De Wit-Hermann-Witten-Rawlins collection of 650
violin makers' labels, and the American musical instrument
manufacturers archives; the biggest of its type in the world.
Scholars and students from across the globe come here to use the
museum's collections and facilities, that gives a wonderful chance
for the students to meet and work with people on the newest
scholarship on musical research. Their collection is nothing short
of astounding, being the only place on this earth where you can see
two 18th century grand pianos with the unique type of action that
was designed by the piano's inventor, Bartolomeo Cristofori. One of
them was created in 1767 by Manuel Antunes of Lisbon, and is the
earliest signed and dated piano by a maker native to Portugal, and
the other one was built by Louis Bas in Villeneuve-les-Avignon in
1781, and is the earliest extant French grand piano in the world.
Other fantastic and unique keyboards are a Neopolitan virginal,
circa 1520, 17th and 18th centuries French, English, Portuguese and
German harpsichords; German and Swedish clavichords and three 17th
century Flemish harpsichords, with two of them being created by
Andreas Ruckers. These collections are unbelievable, as well
as being quite extensive and hold some of the most incredible and
unheard of instruments in the world. To find such an exhaustive
collection in the middle of the prairie is another strange fact as
well. There are woodwinds, early Italian stringed instruments, two
Stradivari guitars, one Stradivari mandolin, instruments that can't
be found anywhere else in the world, saxophones, clarinets, brass
instruments, harmonica, and the Great American guitar collection. In
2007, this small town museum outbid the Metropolitan Museum of Art
at a Christie's auction to acquire a very rare, and quite possibly
the only one of its kind still in existence, of an English cittern
from the late 16th century. Amazing, and one place you will
certainly want to visit when traveling in that region of our
beautiful country.
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W. H. Over Museum
This museum is the results of a
Perkins County homesteader, with an eighth grade education, becoming
a scientist and director of the University of South Dakota museum,
and started in Albion, Illinois in 1866. That is when William Henry
Over was born, and when he was young, he found an arrowhead in his
father's field close to Albion. As the other young boys of his age
started finding ways to break the boredom in their lives, Over
started collecting plants, artifacts and insects, and by the time he
was 15, he was showing his wonderful archaeology collection in his
house in southern Illinois. Somehow he knew that he would one day
direct a big museum, and when he moved to Minnesota to get into
business, he still would collect anything interesting that he could
find or acquire. In 1901, at the American Exposition in Buffalo,
NY., he again showed his collection, often giving lectures on the
local topics from potatoes to early man. Over was living in Deuel
County, South Dakota in 1908, and he now collected fossils, and
since he was such an avid collector, he was able to recognize
unknown crab and snail fossils, two that later were named after him;
the Pisidium overi and the Dakotacancer overani. It wasn't long
before Over, his wife and two children, son and daughter, moved to
Perkins County and started a homestead. He was now a farmer, and
still a collector, and in 1912, he would publish an article called,
"Notes from the Northwest South Dakota" in a journal, called Curio
Collectors. Soon, he was studying natural history, that spanned
fresh-water shells and fossils to the colossal bones of the
dinosaur, triceratops, telling about the relics that were left in
Perkins County by the Arikara peoples. Just the year before, he had
written about the difficult work it took to break rocks to get the
specimens of sphenodiscus lenticularis, and eventually the piece
would fall into the hands of the University of South Dakota Dean, E.
C. Perisho, who was also the state's geologist. That is how Over and
his family moved to Vermillion in 1912, and he became the assistant
director of the USD museum. That new job was able to let Over become
very active in the field of archaeology, also increasing his
interests in history and the cultures of the Native peoples of South
Dakota. Back in 1907, he had given a discourse on the earliest South
Dakota people, the Arikara, whom he'd said were somewhat civilized,
raising beans, squash, corn, tobacco and pumpkins, as well as using
fire to make tools and pottery; and led a quiet and serene lifestyle
in earthen lodges set in permanent villages. During the period from
1917 to 1919, he and his associates would spend two months, each
summer, searching for pre-historic villages along the Missouri
River, and discovering 125 sites. He wrote an article, called, "the
Arikara Culture in South Dakota", that told about the earliest
knowledge of these ingenious natives. In a 1931 Volante article, it
was told that the USD museum held the biggest collection of Arikara
relics in the nation, which Over said put the Arikara on the map. He
would conclude, through his findings in 1934, that the Arikara had
began in the southwest. Two years after he'd joined the museum, Over
started collecting live animals, devoted to getting and education
young minds, he acquired three live opossums, some snakes and a
snowy owl, as well as a diamondback rattler from Texas. The Chicago
Zoological Park bought all his snakes in 1941, and all through his
extensive career, Over's interests would continue to blossom and he
wrote as well; many books that evolved through his discoveries and
his growing knowledge. In 1936, the university honored his exploits
by giving him an honorary degree of doctor of science, and in 1948,
after 35 years of service to that organization, he retired, at the
age of 82. The very next year, the university regents honored him
even more when they changed the name of the museum to the W. H. Over
museum. And then, on February 20, 1956, at the age of 90, William
Henry Over passed on.
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