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Showing posts with label Sigal Music Museum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sigal Music Museum. Show all posts


 Elise Cunin Sigal, my beloved mother

1933-2022


Elise C. Sigal, 89, of Oakland, CA and formerly of Newton, MA, passed away peacefully on Monday, October 30, 2022, surrounded by her children. For 63 years the beloved wife of the late Marlowe A. Sigal. Devoted mother of Erica Sigal and Andrew Sigal.


Born in Bath, PA, and raised in Allentown, PA, Elise spent most of her adult life in Boston and Newton, MA, before moving to Oakland, CA, to be close to her children. She graduated from Brandeis University with a degree in music history.


Elise was an avid gardener; she turned her especial love of trees into a volunteer position at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, assisting in a variety of roles for over two decades, ultimately running their plant information phone line. She was an active participant in the Newton community. She worked with the Newton Creative Arts Committee where she served for a time as Chairperson. 


She shared her late husband’s passion for early music, antiques, and historic homes, frequently attending performances and museums. Elise also hosted visits to her home by musicians and early music organizations. 


She is missed by all those whose lives she touched.


In lieu of flowers, the family asks that remembrances be made to the Cunin/Sigal Research Award Endowment at the Arnold Arboretum, Boston, MA or the Elise C. Sigal Musical Education Fund at the Sigal Music Museum, Greenville, SC.
Ribbon Cutting

In mid-2019 the Carolina Music Museum was renamed as the Sigal Music Museum in honor of my father, and in recognition of the gift of his collection to the museum. We have been trying to have a renaming ceremony ever since, but COVID has forced it to be delayed several times. Finally, on April 22, 2022, we were able to have the event, at which I was honored to speak and cut the ribbon for the opening. [For more on the Sigal Music Museum, see my prior post about it The Uncarved Block: the Sigal Music Museum]

I have been asked for a copy of my remarks, which I present here.

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Good evening.

Thank you all for coming. I can’t tell you how excited, happy, and proud I am to be here today.

I suspect that only a few of you know the story of how my father’s collection made its way from Boston to its beautiful new home here in Greenville.

My father had been collecting musical instruments for decades. From time to time he would consider the question of what he wanted to have happen to them after he died – and then he wouldn’t do anything about it. Occasionally someone from one institution or another would approach him about the collection, but for a variety of reasons it never worked out.

And then he had his heart attack. When I heard the news, I called his hospital room from my home in Oakland, California. True to form, he said it was no big deal and he would be back at work by Wednesday – this was on a Monday. Well, I was glad to hear that!!! But… I decided to call his doctor just to be sure. His doctor said, “Ohhhh, no. No indeed. Your father is an 88-year-old man who just had a massive heart attack. You want to get out here right now.” So, I got on the next flight to Boston.

I spent a lot of time with dad at the hospital, talking about a lot of things – including, of course, what he wanted done with the collection. He said he would want it to stay together as much as possible, though he acknowledged that with a collection of its size, that could be a tall order. He recited a list of institutions where he might like to see the instruments go. He even talked about possibly starting his own museum - apparently, he told me, there was a crazy guy in South Carolina who had done just that!

Unfortunately, believing you are superman can only take you so far, and within about a week he was in a coma, and then died. Perhaps that is a lesson for all of us that think we are immortal.

In his will he left the collection to my mother, with a note asking her to dispose of it in accordance with his wishes. That became one of the main tasks that my mother, my sister Erica, and I, had on our plates. We spoke with most of the institutions he had previously named. Some of them wanted certain parts of the collection but not others. Some wanted the collection but with unacceptable provisos. And so on. The search for where the collection should go stretched out to months upon months.

Along the way, our good friend Darcy Kuronen connected me with Tom Strange, that crazy guy in South Carolina, and his museum. The Carolina Music Museum was very new; with no track record, but with the flexibility to make the decision to take the collection. And they wanted all of it! Every instrument, every book, every email my dad had sent or received, every everything. And in recognition, they wanted to rename the museum in his honor.

It sounded perfect, but it was still a difficult decision that we agonized over. Could they pull it off? Did it make sense for the collection to go somewhere with which my father had had no affiliation? How crazy was this [Tom] Strange guy? There were a couple of other good options, but in the end, this museum, this city, and these people won us over. And it was a great decision.

It is wonderful to see these pieces as they deserve to be seen. Not tucked into every corner of our former home. Now they will be cared for in perpetuity in an appropriate setting.

Finally, these instruments will be available for scholars, novices, or those that are simply curious to examine, study, or just to enjoy. Students can now come to see and to learn how these instruments contributed to the origins of Western musical traditions. And perhaps they may inspire young people to develop the kind of passion that my father, my mother, Tom, and everyone else here today all share.

My mother has since said that the gift to this museum has worked out better than she could possibly have imagined. I couldn’t agree more. My only regret is that my father didn’t make this move himself, so that he could see the care and appreciation that everyone at the Carolina Music Museum – now the Sigal Music Museum - has lavished on The Marlowe A. Sigal Collection.

Thank you.


My father had an extraordinary avocation; he collected and restored antique musical instruments. Over roughly 50 years of collecting, he amassed an astonishing number of pieces, a remarkable expertise, and worldwide recognition as an authority on early instruments and music.

His collecting began with keyboards, starting with a broken pedal organ that his father got somewhere and gave to him with the instruction, “if you can fix it, you can have it.” It turns out that he could fix it, and so began this lifelong interest.

Eventually his collection drove us out of my childhood home and into a much larger house with what seemed like plenty of room. But as the space increased, so did his appetite. It took a couple of decades, but he managed to fill the house. There were keyboard instruments in bedrooms, in the dining room, in his study, in the family room, in the “music room”, in the front hall, stacked coffin-like in the basement, and eventually unceremoniously filling the back recesses of the warehouse at his factory.

It was around this time that he began collecting blessedly smaller woodwind instruments. Yet over the ensuing years, it was beginning to become hard to find places to put even one more piccolo, with all manner of antique woodwinds not only in display cabinets and specially made drawers, but also stacked on top of the ubiquitous pianos.

Eventually, at the request of many in the early music world, he produced a beautiful catalog:
One thing he didn’t do was to make any real plan for what he wanted to have happen to the collection after his death. He had left letters, unsigned wills, and varying codicils to his one official will. He also told me at the hospital, a few days before he died, what he would like to have happen to all these instruments. After he passed and I read through his papers, I found none of these documents, formal or informal, agreed with each other, nor did they agree with his verbal instructions to me. But there was one thread that remained constant; if possible, he would like the collection to stay together, and to be made available to the public for education, appreciation, and research.

It turns out that giving away hundreds of antique instruments is not as easy as it sounds. Keyboards in particular take up a lot of space – something of which the family was painfully aware. Moreover, many of the instruments were made of wood, with bits of leather and other temperamental materials thrown in. These ancient ingredients require a lot of care and feeding to make sure they don’t degrade. As if that weren’t enough, many of them contain ivory (for example, the keys of the pianos). Though it was 100% clear that the animals had died hundreds of years in the past, the current regulations from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) make any transportation or sale of ivory of any vintage difficult, if not impossible. If that wasn't enough, some of the instruments contained bone, or other material that looks like ivory, and thus would require DNA testing to prove that it is not ivory before being transported in or out of the country.

I won’t bore you with the details of the search for a home for the collection, except to say that we spent months talking to representatives of various museums and universities, had them come and visit the collection, and listened to their proposals. The family had endless conversations, wrung our hands, and bit our nails. I went so far as to research the elevations and distance inland for the various institutions in consideration of how climate change and rising sea levels might impact the housing of the collection into the unknowable future.

After months of conversations and negotiations, we chose to give the collection as a whole to The Carolina Music Museum, in Greenville, South Carolina, along with a gift to help with the care and maintenance of this trove of material. In recognition of this, and my father’s contributions to the world of musical instrument preservation, the museum changed its name to the Sigal Music Museum.


The name was officially changed in mid-2019. However, due to the installation and removal of existing exhibits, the effort in moving the collection from Boston to Greenville, COVID-19, and other things, the name change wasn’t publicized until now. The new signage is up on the building, labeling is changed, t-shirts are printed, and the new website is ready… and it looks wonderful.

The Sigal Music Museum website is beautiful (and I'm not just sayin' that.) Check it out at https://sigalmusicmuseum.org. Plans for the "Sensational Sigal" exhibit are going full speed ahead. None of us can wait until my father’s collection is unveiled to the world in its new home - which, pandemic willing, will occur later this year.

Please do check out the web site, and if you are in the Greenville area, go to the museum itself. Online you will find a terrific series of videos that have been done by the curators, showing off the several collections that are in the museum’s charge. These can be found on SigalMusicMuseum.org, YouTube, and Instagram.

My whole family is exceedingly proud of the collection and the work done by the Sigal Music Museum to preserve and display it. We are thrilled that our hand wringing and brow furrowing decision making process paid off in the selection of a most excellent new home for my father’s legacy. I'm sure he would be pleased.