In this episode, I’m joined by Professor Gabriele Rossi Rognoni, curator of the Royal College of Music Museum, London, for a wide-ranging conversation. Drawing on his experience developing and re-imagining musical instrument museums across Europe, Professor Rossi Rognoni reflects on how collections can tell richer stories about sound, craft, and cultural exchange. We explore the evolving role of instrument museums in the twenty-first century. It’s a thoughtful discussion on how objects, music, and audiences meet—and how museums can bring instruments meaningfully to life.

Harps - and by extension their making - are among the oldest families of musical instruments known to humankind. Most of us recognise the sound of the modern harp, often associated with serenity and calm, but this is only one facet of a far richer and more complex instrument. Far fewer people know how the harps we hear today came to be.

In this episode of Instrumental, I speak with John Hoare, founding partner and director of Pilgrim Harps, the UK’s foremost maker of folk and concert harps, as he reflects on his retirement after nearly sixty years in the craft. John is a true font of knowledge and one of the most experienced harp makers of his generation.

We discuss how he first came to make harps, his life in the workshop - rich with wonderful anecdotes - and the future of Pilgrim Harps under his successors, Penny Johnson and Tom Greaves, as John steps back into a well-earned retirement.