National Music Museum

Arne B. Larson, the eldest of nine children, started collecting instruments as a boy and never stopped. As a band and music teacher he bought horns, fiddles and oddities wherever he found them, and missionaries returning from India, Africa and East Asia brought him more. By the 1960s he had some 2,500 instruments and no room for them, and in 1966 the University of South Dakota offered to house the collection and make him a professor of music. People asked why such a collection should sit in Vermillion; it was, he answered, no farther from New York to Vermillion than from Vermillion to New York.

The Shrine to Music Museum opened on the campus in 1973, with his son Andre as director, a post he held until 2011. Under him it grew into one of the most important collections of musical instruments anywhere, renamed the National Music Museum, a Smithsonian affiliate. Its treasures include the Witten-Rawlins collection of early Italian stringed instruments, a guitar made by Antonio Stradivari and one of only two Stradivari mandolins known to survive, along with harpsichords, a deep collection of American brass and saxophones, and folk instruments from every continent.

The museum closed for nearly five years for renovation and reopened its galleries in August 2023, with instruments from many centuries and every continent back on display.