During a tour at the National Music Museum, conservator Darryl Martin walked up to one instrument, a small wooden keyboard painted an olive green.
Its lid is propped up, revealing its insides, and Martin plucked a string as he walked by.
“This is actually the oldest playable harpsichord in the world,” he said. “It was made in Naples, probably around about 1525, 1530-ish.”
Five hundred years later, the world’s oldest playable harpsichord has made its way to Vermillion, South Dakota. A town of just under 12,000 tucked into the state’s southeastern tail, it boasts one of the world’s greatest collections of musical instruments.
Dwight Vaught, director at the National Music Museum, knows what you’re thinking.
“Why the National Music Museum is in Vermillion, South Dakota is probably our most asked question,” he said.
THE story all starts when a man named Arne Larson came to town with his 2,500 instruments, collected during his time as a band and orchestra director at a high school in Brookings, S.D.
It was 1966, and the University of South Dakota in Vermillion had hired Larson as a music professor. The new recruit came with a catch.
“When he was hired by the University of South Dakota, he said, ‘Do you have a place that I can store my instruments?’” Vaught said. “And so they offered him a space.”
Larson’s son, André, led the charge to turn the storage space into a museum. He was the first director when the museum officially opened its doors in 1973.
‘Top three in the world’
André really put the museum on the map in 1984, when he coordinated a $3 million donation to purchase a prestigious collection of early Italian strings that included the world’s oldest cello.
The acquisition – now known as the Witten-Rawlins collection – brought the museum global attention.
André said people would have to make the trek to the Midwest to see the historic instruments. As his father famously said, it’s just as far from New York to Vermillion as it is from Vermillion to New York.
Fifty years after its founding, the museum boasts 14,000 instruments, covering everything from a clay whistle made as early as 600 AD to one of Elvis’ guitars.
