---
title: "John Koster"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "John Koster"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-07-20T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Frank Hubbard","William Dowd","harpsichord revival vs. historical construction","Early Music America"]
---


Former Curator of Keyboard Instruments at the National Music Museum, University of South Dakota (1991–2015), a 20-year Boston-area harpsichord maker in his own right, and a recipient of the American Musical Instrument Society's Curt Sachs lifetime-achievement award. Matters to this vault as the named domain-expert reviewer whose *Early Music America* piece on *The Boston School of Harpsichord Building* is the Tier-2 anchor for the vault's claim that [[entity-frank-hubbard|Hubbard]] and [[entity-william-dowd|Dowd]]'s 1949 Boston workshop drove the historical-construction reversal — a practitioner-historian reviewing, in a trade venue, the makers' own firsthand reminiscences.

## References
- [[claim-hubbard-dowd-founded-1949-boston-workshop-on-historical-principles]]