Sigal Museum of Music: Sound and History

Some of the best museum visits are ones you didn’t plan, didn’t expect and involve museums you didn’t even know about until you arrived there.

That was my experience with the Sigal Music Museum in Greenville, South Carolina. I was on a road trip, stretching a four-hour drive from Charlotte to Atlanta into a week of poking around and staying off the Interstates.

A docent at a Charlotte museum suggested I stop at the Upcountry History Museum in Greenville. The Sigal is its next-door neighbor, along with the Greenville County Museum of Art and the Children’s Museum of the Upstate. By the way, that’s only about half the museums in Greenville, including one devoted to Shoeless Joe Jackson!

As you can likely tell from the pictures, one of the museum’s specialties is its collection of historic keyboard instruments; they occupy most of the ground floor, and with an app and QR codes, you can hear many of them played by the museum’s experts and prominent musicians. The upper floor, which we’ll come to, is a deep lesson in the rest of the world of instruments.

Despite the number and variety of the museum’s pianos, they are only part of the keyboard collection. The model above shows the so-called Viennese Grand Piano Action (actually an import from Augsburg!) that marked the difference between pianos (strings struck by hammers) and harpsichords and virginals (strings plucked by a pick or quill). Just below, a 16th century virginal by the Italian master Baffo, who also made one for England’s Queen Elizabeth I.

One thing quickly clear is that while the shape we associate with a grand piano has been around since early in the Piano Era, it’s far from the only shape; square or rectangular pianos were also common, fitting well with other furniture.

Some of the pianos have connections to famous figures as well; the grand just above was played by Chopin while touring Britain in 1848; the square piano just above was made specially for the celebrations when the Marquis de Lafayette returned to visit America in 1824, almost fifty years after his role in the Revolution.

Another instrument with a famous player is this two-manual harpsichord by Jacob Kirkman; it was built as a wedding present to Queen Charlotte from King George III. Mozart played it when, on tour at age 9, he played for the royal family at Buckingham Palace.

With the elaborate decoration of the royal harpsichord at hand, it seems like a moment to mention how much decorative attention these instruments got; they clearly were an important part of the decor in homes rich enough to own them. Several of the museum’s instruments have that reverse-color keyboard.

Keyboard instruments have a long history as ‘appropriate’ for women to play, and for families of a certain status, it was expected that young women would learn to play. Along with them, some stringed instruments were considered appropriate—but never a violin or cello!

And now, after a brief interlude to consider six different varieties of saxophone made by, of course, Adolphe Sax, and a gift shop featuring musical Legos, we turn to the upper floor.

Until I got to the top of the steps, I had thought of musical instruments in terms like strings, brass, keyboard, percussion, wind. It turns out that while those fit a lot of Western instruments fairly well, they fall well short of universal. Universal, of course, is pretty hard to achieve and if you’re curious just how hard, it’s worth a look at Wikipedia’s article on Musical Instrument Classification, which reflects a still-continuing discussion.

The exhibits at the Sigal Museum use a system developed in 1914 by Curt Sachs and Ernst von Hornbostel, German ethnologists, originally with four categories and a fifth added later.

• idiophones, such as the xylophone, which produce sound by vibrating themselves;
• membranophones, such as drums or kazoos, which produce sound by a vibrating membrane;
• chordophones, such as the piano or cello, which produce sound by vibrating strings;
• aerophones, such as the pipe organ or oboe, which produce sound by vibrating columns of air
• electrophones, such as theremins, which produce sound by electronic means.

It’s a system that allows seeing connections between instruments from different cultures and eras, and also helps explain such oddballs as the three above. They are, an 1850 Hurdy-Gurdy from France that is a chordophone with a crank; the Rolmonica, an aerophone that uses a punched paper role to open and close the right holes to vibrate the right reeds, and another aerophone, the 1830 Symphonium invented by Charles Wheatstone. Based on a traditional Japanese brass free reed instrument, it is the ancestor of concertinas, accordions and even the harmonica.

Definitely an aerophone: This is actually a super-compact pipe organ. Described as a chamber organ, it dates to 1790. It was sold largely to wealthy families who had their worship services at home. With the top closed, it looks like a desk, complete with faux drawers.

The electrophones are an interestingly wide variety. The first below is the Theramin, named for its inventor, and in vogue for a while in the 1920s and 1930s. It is based on a wave-generator and antenna, and it’s played by moving your hands through the waves, disrupting them in various ways that are detected by the antenna and played as sound. It was kind of fun playing it, though I can’t claim my output was especially musical!

Here’s a cross-over: a combination of chordophone and electrophone—it’s the Baldwin Electric Harpsichord, used on TV by the Monkees, the Partridge Family, and in the Beatles’ recording of ‘Because.’

The Storytone Piano, a joint venture of a piano maker and RCA, replaced the soundboard of a traditional piano with electronic pickups similar to those used by an electric guitar. It was a hit at the 1939 Worlds Fair, but production ended during World War II. To complete the ensemble, a radio set and phonograph were built into the piano bench.

There’s also a complete workstation set up for those who’d like to experiment a bit more with electrophonic music.

And, room at the end for an unusual item: The 1913 Dolcette, a sort of piano-harp mashup that used a hammer to strike flat steel springs with an effect like a mandolin. It never got very far; the museum’s label reports that “The Dolcette company was under-capitalized, the inventor a somewhat distracted individual. Fifty were ordered, ten were sold, and this is one of only six remaining. It couldn’t have found a more fitting home.

Nuts and Bolts

516 Buncombe Street, Greenville, South Carolina
Open Tuesday-Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm, Sunday 1 pm to 5 pm
Admission: $7 adults, $ senior/military, $4 ages 6-18

The museum is located on Greenville’s Heritage Green, shared with the Greenville County Museum of Art, the Upcountry History Museum, Children’s Museum of the Upstate and the Central Library.
Free parking is available