Brevard Music Center
The Brevard Music Center is an international summer institute and festival located in Brevard, North Carolina. Brevard Music Center has traditionally focused on all periods of classical music, but in recent years, it has branched out to include bluegrass and more contemporary selections. It enrolls about four hundred students, age fourteen and older, who participate in orchestra and other large ensembles, an opera program, play chamber music, study composition, and take private lessons. A faculty of sixty is drawn from orchestras, conservatories, and universities. The season runs from the last week of June through the first week of August. Four performance venues, including the 1800-seat Whittington-Pfohl Auditorium, host more than eighty public concerts that attract audiences of some 50,000 persons. The Music Center, as it is known colloquially, also partners with the Transylvania County Library for a number of free public events. With an annual budget of more than three million dollars, the Center contributes substantially to the economy of western North Carolina.
The Brevard Music Center began life in 1936 as a summer music camp for boys at Davidson College. The founder, Davidson faculty member James Christian Pfohl, led the program for seven years at Davidson and one season at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1944 Pfohl moved the program to its present location in Brevard, North Carolina, and he instituted a festival of concerts in 1945. The name "Brevard Music Center" was adopted in 1955. Pfohl remained artistic director until 1964, when he was succeeded by Henry Janiec of Converse College, for whom the opera program is named. Janiec was succeeded in 1997 by conductor David Effron. Keith Lockhart became the Artistic Director in October 2007.
The Brevard Music Center offers instruction in orchestral instruments, piano, composition, voice, and opera. Two-thirds of the student body is college age or older, and all students and faculty live on the wooded campus of 180 acres (0.73 km2). Famous alumni include countertenor David Daniels, Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart, and violist Roberto Diaz, president of the Curtis Institute of Music.