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Carolina Music Museum

If you like beautiful old keyboard instruments, not to mention beautiful small museums, I strongly recommend that you pay a visit to the Carolina Music Museum, in Greenville South Carolina. The museum is housed in a former Coca Cola bottling plant, and the collection features more than forty English, European, and American harpsichords and pianos dating from 1570 to 1845. They’re all playable, they all have fascinating individual histories, and they’ve all been refurbished and restored to pristine condition by a remarkable man named Thomas Strange. Strange is a physicist by profession, but he got the keyboard bug in college when he played on a hand-built clavichord, and he started building and collecting instruments. Many thousands of hours of study and work later he had become one of the world’s experts in the restoration of old keyboard instruments, and had amassed the collection that became the heart of the Carolina Music Museum.

This has been A Minute with Miles – a production of South Carolina Public Radio, made possible by the J.M. Smith Corporation.

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Miles Parks is a reporter on NPR's Washington Desk. He covers voting and elections, and also reports on breaking news.