I plan our vacations. My wife is generally happy just to go where I take her. Which means that she’s gone to a lot of battlefields and places to see birds. I thought it would be nice to take her somewhere she would enjoy more than I would. I think it worked out that way, although I enjoyed this place much more than I expected to.
The National Music Museum is on the Campus of The University of South Dakota, in Vermillion, in the southeast corner of the state. We arrived just as it opened and had it pretty much to ourselves. Admission was $10/person, which included a player and earphones we could use to hear some of the instruments being played.
There are more than 15,000 instruments in the collection, but I’m guessing that less than half of them were on display. Some of them were incredible works of art even apart from the music they made. I wish the displays gave more of the human history instead of concentrating on the technical details.
Anyway, what follows is about half the photos I took. Hold your cursor over the photos to read what I know about the instruments, if anything. In some cases, you can read the display cards if you click on the photos to enlarge them.
While my wife looked around the gift shop, I got the red chair and took the photo at the top of the post and this one. The piano I chose was a semi-grand built in London in 1876.
