I‘ve always loved the sound of a serpent. Well, no, not really. The 16th-century musical instrument is breathy, buzzy, and inexact—consistently requiring the player to gesture at the note in what’s called falset: using the tension of the lips in the mouthpiece to approximate a tone that the instrument’s fingering and natural overtones don’t want to produce. There was a reason the valved brass tuba swept the serpent out of modern orchestras in the 19th century. The tuba could, like, you know, actually sound the note. A clean, solid bass line, and if the price was a little brassiness instead of the woodwindy tones of the serpent, so be it. The bassoons could handle those, and the tubas would provide the solid floor, down in the orchestra’s basement, for Western music.
No, what I’ve always loved is the idea of the serpent. Its shape, the odd way the throat sticks straight out from the players’ faces while the giant S snakes down their chests. The dated instrument may not be much use for the precise performances of modern music, but it does look wonderful in a museum.
In the National Music Museum, for instance, where they’ve got an English serpent on display, with an aristocratic coat of arms painted on it—upheld by a lion and a horse. Of course. From the 16th century on, people seemed to think an instrument just wasn’t special unless it was slathered with fleurs-de-lis and mottos. A violin that Andrea Amati made in Cremona around 1560, for example, has Quo unico propugnaculo stat stabitq reli painted along its sides—Latin for “By means of this defender, religion stands and will stand.” Which ain’t all that far, if you stop to think about it, from Woody Guthrie’s mounting “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar in the 1940s.
As it happens, that violin is also on display at the National Music Museum. Along with Amati’s King Henry IV violin from 1595 (a royal instrument with Henricus IV Dei Grat Franc et Nav Rex—“Henry IV, by the Grace of God, King of France and Navarre”—painted on it, naturally). And beside it is a set of other 17th- and 18th-century violins, from Maggini, Jacob Stainer, Antonio Stradivari, Ruggerius, Carcassi, the Brescian school, Meisel, and all the rest of the craftsmen pouring out instruments in the busy era of the newly perfected violin. An American parallel, in a much reduced time frame, can be found in the obsessed, half-mad woodcarvers, luthiers, and inventors who made the guitar the central instrument of popular music, from Orville Gibson to Les Paul.
Examples of their work can be found in the guitar room at, ahem, the National Music Museum—a museum I’ve been visiting for some while now and recommending ever since my first trip through its displays of saxophones, early keyboards, harmonicas, and theremins. I promote it so relentlessly that this spring the museum put me on its board of trustees, possibly as the only way to get me to stop talking about it as an underappreciated treasure of an American museum—since, I gather their thinking went, everyone on the board already appreciates the place.
They’re nearly alone. In Vermillion, South Dakota, in the restored rooms of an old Carnegie Library building, is what someone might call an underappreciated treasure of an American museum. The southeast corner of the state is not one of the nation’s most popular tourist destinations, and Vermillion is a 60-mile drive off the main I-90 corridor that carries traffic through South Dakota toward the Black Hills. It’s a 60-mile side-trip, however, that’s worth taking time for, on one’s way to Mount Rushmore.
Or worth visiting just for its own sake. There’s always pressure on museums in America’s smaller cities. Donors start out dubious about the distant place, and if a museum succeeds in building a world-class collection anyway, the pressure only increases: Why aren’t we in New York or Washington? Chicago or Los Angeles? Somewhere the museum could attract the crowds it deserves?
The answer involves things that Tocqueville would have understood: the social health of the nation in the scattering of its cultural centers, the localism that needs encouraging, and the greater relative effect of something like a museum in a smaller city. But that’s a thousand-page book on political theory, and the shorter answer is that the National Music Museum remains an underappreciated treasure. You should go to Vermillion, South Dakota, and see it.
