William Sergeant Kendall (1869-1938) was an American figure painter who had studied in Paris and exhibited at the Paris Salon. Christine Herter Kendall (1890-1981), his second wife, was also a painter. The couple moved permanently to Virginia in the early 1920s and began building Garth Newel on a 114-acre tract above Hot Springs. The main house went up between 1923 and 1924 - a three-story central block flanked by 2 1/2-story wings, every section topped by a gambrel roof and clad in rough-sawn vertical board-and-batten. The aesthetic was deliberate. The Kendalls were artists who had chosen Virginia mountain country for its quiet, and they wanted a home that fit the landscape rather than dominated it. The cottages, the entrance piers, the Arabian horse barn, the indoor riding arena - all went up in the same idiom around 1925. The complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013.

The Kendalls hosted small concerts at Garth Newel throughout their lives - chamber music played in the main residence for friends and guests from Bath County's elite summer society. When Christine died in 1981, the question was what to do with a 114-acre artist's estate with no living owners. The answer, in 1973 - actually established eight years before Christine's death and during her lifetime - was the Garth Newel Music Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to chamber music education and performance. The Center took the Kendalls' tradition of mountainside concerts and made it institutional. Today Garth Newel hosts more than 50 concerts a year, runs an extensive education program, and is one of the most distinctive chamber-music venues in the eastern United States.

At the center of Garth Newel's musical life is the Garth Newel Piano Quartet - the resident ensemble of violin, viola, cello, and piano. The quartet's current members are Teresa Ling on violin, Fitz Gary on viola, Isaac Melamed on cello, and Jeannette Fang on piano. They perform more than 50 concerts a year at the Center and tour widely. Recent tours have included Carnegie Hall in New York, the Corcoran Gallery, Strathmore Hall, the Virginia Military Institute, the Lyceum in Alexandria, the Williamsburg Chamber Music Society, the Washington Conservatory, the University of Memphis, and the San Diego Chamber Music Workshop. The quartet has performed on five continents. In 2012 they toured Turkey at length, and in 2014 they spent over a week performing in Croatia. They have recorded the Mozart and Brahms G-minor piano quartets, plus the Dvorak E-flat major and the lesser-known Martinu first quartet.

The Summer Chamber Music Festival, on weekends between late June and Labor Day, features twenty performances by the quartet and guest artists, plus student ensemble performances from the Fellowship program. Three "Fall Foliage" concert weekends fill October. Thanksgiving and New Year's holiday weekends bring chamber programs to the snow-covered mountain. Wintertime "pub" concerts add an informal counterpoint to the formal recitals. Three concert weekends in May, the Virginia Blues and Jazz Festival in June, and an American Made concert series featuring bluegrass, old-time, and other traditional American music forms round out the schedule. Recent visiting ensembles have included the Parker String Quartet, the Enso, the Daedalus, and the Borromeo. In 2012, Chamber Music America gave Garth Newel its CMAcclaim Award for contributions to the field. The Center celebrated its 40th anniversary in the summer of 2013.

The education programs are as central to Garth Newel as the performances. Each summer, college and conservatory students from around the world come for the Young Artists Fellowship - a month of rehearsals and master classes culminating in a final concert at the music center. The Allegheny Mountain String Project is partnered with the Center and rehearses there several times a year. The Appomattox Regional Governor's School orchestra spends a weekend each spring working with the quartet. An Amateur Chamber Music Workshop each March brings adult amateur musicians to the mountain for intensive coaching. The Kendalls would have understood. They started by hosting small concerts in their living room because they believed in the music. The Center continues that work on a scale they could not have imagined - but with the same idea behind it.