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A Minute With Miles: 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, SC. 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 Hoffman is the founder and violist of the American Chamber Players, with whom he regularly tours the United States, and the Virginia I. Norman Distinguished Visiting Professor of Chamber Music at the Schwob School of Music, in Columbus, Georgia. He has appeared as viola soloist with orchestras across the country, and his solo performances on YouTube have received well over 700,000 views.