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.

Some of the many highlights of the collection include:

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.

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 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.