If you’re missing the National Music Museum (NMM) while we are closed for expansion, you can still enjoy the collection through a new highlights book the Museum has just published.
Responding to popular request, the NMM has created a colorful 8" x 7" 80-page softcover edition in which you’ll find some of the museum’s musical-instrument head-turners and crowd favorites. Sixty+ instruments (out of 15,000 in the NMM’s historic holdings) are pictured along with brief descriptions. The book also includes a short history of the Museum, answering the question “Why is the NMM in Vermillion, South Dakota?”).
Like the NMM’s collections overall, some of the instruments in the book are fascinating for their incomparable sound quality, some for their extraordinary beauty or rarity, some for their unequalled craftsmanship and preeminent makers, some for their compelling cultural contexts or ownership histories, some for their materials and technical ingenuity, some for their associations with great performers. They are all valued survivors, travelers through time.
Among the book’s high notes: the NMM’s stellar Stradivari and Amati stringed instruments, as well as the famed ‘Neapolitan’ harpsichord, and Adolphe Sax brass masterworks.
The High Notes book is another achievement of the National Music Museum’s mission, to “explore, enjoy, and preserve the world of musical instruments.”
The $12.95 book can be purchased here on the NMM website, in our online gift shop. It is $12.95 (plus shipping and handling as applicable).
The Museum’s popular NMM Live! concert series will also continue despite the museum-building closure. Concerts will be held not at the NMM but mainly in Farber Hall (Old Main Building, University of South Dakota campus). On November 9, Vince DiMartino’s trio will showcase the power and diversity of trumpets in a Friday evening NMM Live! concert. On Thursday evening, December 6, the popular Hegg Brothers’ NMM Live! Holiday Show will fill Farber Hall with its high-energy multi-instrumental sound.
The Museum is also collaborating with the Vermillion Theatres on big-screen 'NMM at the Movies' showings. Enjoy the award-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man, Monday, October 22, at the Coyote Twin, downtown Vermillion.
Throughout the museum’s preparations for expansion and during construction, the NMM will be alive remotely and virtually. Stay connected to the NMM via social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We will be very busy behind the scenes and will be offering virtual glimpses online into our work and the collections within our collections. You’ll see some things online that we’ve never displayed before. Stay tuned. (Pun intended.)
