This is General Nathanael Greene, the only revolutionary war general that I know of for whom 2 cities are named— Greensboro N.C. and Greenville, S.C. This statue stands in the park in Greenville where the Music Museum is that we will visit in this and subsequent posts. I was the guest of my cousins Greg and Kathy West, and about to do a retreat for a Methodist Church in Greenville. More on that later.
For a musician like myself, this is one of the more fascinating and unique museums I’ve ever visited, as it has a world class collection of musical instruments of the vintage sort, especially an incredible collection of keyboards from virgnals, to spinets, to harpsichords, to pianos of every shape and size imaginable. You can practically trace the evolution of the keyboard up to the 20th century in this museum. And the problem is they have too little space— they have hundreds more instruments in storage. Such is the fate of many a small museum of all sorts. In this post I’m going to focus on some of the keyboards. Some of these pianos are works of art, in terms of their wood works…..
Many of these keyboard instruments were made in Europe and shipped to the U.S. in the 19th century, but not all of them. The craftsmanship in the woodworking, and the detail is amazing, for instance,
The difference between the early harpsichords and later pianos, is that the strings in a harpsichord are plucked, where as in more modern pianos there are soft padded mallets or hammers which hit the strings. In the evolution of the instrument it did not begin with 88 keys, indeed it had far fewer strings. And one has to take into account the rise of the pipe organ in churches, and then the smaller version of personal organs, which has at least as long a history as the piano. The name piano comes from the Italian word for soft, and originally the instrument was called a piano/forte. i.e. a soft and loud instrument, capable of both. And there was right into the 20th century much experiment of shapes and sizes and even numbers of keyboards.
More in the next post.
English (US) · 