Chronicling Joy

I’ve been away from the blog for a few months working on two big projects.  One of them launches Jan. 1st, and I thought in this season of joy you might like to hear about it.  It has been an amazing revelation.   The project is a new radio series called America’s Music Festivals.  We’re broadcasting from 26 different festivals and we heard dozens of comments like these from each one:

“I’ve never laughed so much in my life” (Benny Kim, Music from Angel Fire)

“It’s one of the most spectacularly beautiful places I’ve ever been to… it’s not very often that you can go to a festival and see bald eagles while playing music…   There’s an inspiration when nature is so pure … that it makes you feel that you can give a lot more of yourself musically.” (Eric Kim, Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival)

“Passion, foremost… striving with the festival toward really, really the highest artistic integrity. … I have such passion for my work.  I feel so blessed that I’m doing this with my life I want to bring that to the people and I want them to feel the same way about it …making every day fun. (Anne-Marie McDermott, Bravo! Vail Valley)

“This is something that brings people together.  This is about the best of the American spirit;  not just to find some new idea and make a lot of money, but to find an idea, to nurture the idea,  … to make the dream a living, breathing reality.  We’ve got every continent represented in one way or another, and so we really are an international family of people working towards a common end.” (Eliot Fisk, Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival)

“I feel so inspired by my colleagues… we eat all of our meals together and …a chef actually comes in and cooks the meals in between, so we can smell the food going while we’re rehearsing, and then we have a beautiful, beautiful food break, and then come back and rehearse some more…  I believe that the hanging out together really helps seal the sense of trust and confidence we have, even though a lot of us come from really different places.”  (Cynthia Phelps, Seattle Chamber Music Society)

” The Cabrillo experience is all about people and relationships: how we use art to express ourselves; how we communicate and learn and assimilate and how we are bound together by creativity. ” (Marin Alsop, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music)

“I love many many things about Steamboat, but I love the wildlife in particular.  We have three owls living in one of the eaves of our hall, and so every morning – it’s almost like religion – we have to go out before we play. This has got to be a really good omen if you’ve got three owls under the eaves.   And there was a bear sleeping in the tree.  A big black bear just very calmly enjoying himself with a nice long snooze.  And everybody was crowded around.  Where else can you see that? ”  (Andres Cardenes, Strings in the Mountains)

“It’s one of Nature’s great, great places.  It’s absolutely gorgeous .  You have to picture the setting where the orchestra plays.  We play at the ski village up at Durango Mountain Resort… And it’s a big tent, very much like Aspen, with a view of 14,000 foot peaks.  The tent sits at 9,000 feet high; the setting is like a dream and the orchestra acoustics in the tent are fantastic, so it’s an incredible destination with everything that you could hope for in nature and wildlife.  It’s a great place.” (Guillermo Figueroa, Music in the Mountains, Durango)

What we found in producing this series is that the festivals are fun, happy places.  The musicians are relaxed and inspired.  The festival-goers are in a vacation frame of mind.  I feel like we’ve re-discovered the fun and magic of music, have bottled it, and are lucky to be able to put it on the radio.  We’ve done our best to capture the spirit along with the music. 

The other project that has kept me up nights is the American Handel Festival in Seattle in March.  I invite you to come visit us for this wonderful festival — 30 concerts, a scholarly conference, chorus and keyboard workshops, and a whole host of other activities, all fueled by Pacific Northwest cuisine (aka salmon) and Seattle coffee.

I wish you a wonderful holiday season.  May it be peaceful and musical.