By Lauren Stepp
A “visionary.” That’s how Alice Keith Pfohl Knowles, 88, describes her late father, James Christian Pfohl (1912-1997).
“He was a developer, a builder and an innovator,” she shares from her home in Black Mountain. Of course, Pfohl also happened to be the founder of the Brevard Music Center (BMC), one of America’s most acclaimed summer training programs and music festivals.
According to Knowles, bringing Beethoven to the Blue Ridge was her father’s fate.
“He always wanted to be a conductor,” she notes. “When Father was a young child, he went to a concert by the great American bandmaster John Philip Sousa, and that’s what hooked him.”
But even before that performance, Pfohl lived and breathed music. The son of a minister, he grew up playing in a church band alongside his five siblings in Winston-Salem. This experience earned him a scholarship to the National Music Camp at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan in 1929.
When Pfohl returned home later that summer, he had his mind made up. He was going to create a similar music experience for students in the South.
Four years later, when Pfohl was hired as the director of music at Davidson College, he got to work making that vision a reality. His program, then known as the Davidson College Music School Camp, hosted its first season in 1936. Seven years later, the camp relocated to Queens College in downtown Charlotte.
Though a convenient location, Pfohl wanted to find a quieter setting. With this in mind, Pfohl and his wife, Louise, traveled to Brevard in the summer of 1943 to tour a 100-acre plot that once served as Camp Transylvania. When they arrived, they found neglected buildings, overgrown fields and a lone cow. It was perfect.
“My wife and I knew immediately,” Pfohl wrote of the property. “This is the spot.”
In 1944, Pfohl launched the inaugural summer session of the Transylvania Music Camp (later renamed the Brevard Music Center in 1955). The camp was so well received that it attracted the attention of Time magazine.
“We do not have a topflight professional music school in the South,” Pfohl shared with the illustrious publication in 1944. “We hope the students we train will lift the South’s musical life.”
And so they have. In the nearly 80 years since, BMC and its alumni have helped establish Brevard as the music capital of the region, attracting some 700 students to its campus every summer.
From June to August, the center also hosts the Summer Festival—a series of more than 80 musical performances at the Parker Concert Hall and the Whittington-Pfohl Auditorium. (Knowles points out that the latter is named after Pfohl’s parents, Bessie Whittington and Bishop J. Kenneth Pfohl.) Together, these concerts bring an estimated 40,000 visitors to the area each year.
“This,” Knowles says of BMC’s great success, “was always Father’s vision.”
To purchase tickets to the 2024 Summer Festival, visit BrevardMusic.org/tickets or call the BMC Box Office at 828.862.2105. The Box Office at Whittington-Pfohl Auditorium is located at Brevard Music Center Campus, 349 Andante Lane, Brevard. It is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. The Summer Festival runs through August 25, and tickets start at $25.