Denver Magazine / Denver Magazine June 2009 / Music in the Mountains

 Email  Print  Feed

Music in the Mountains

Although the Aspen Music Festival and School has grown from its origins as a two-week Goethe Bicentennial Festival in a Colorado backwater town to 2009’s 400-event program celebrating its 60th anniversary, the core reasons behind the festival’s existence haven’t changed. From 1949 to today, musicians still gather here to listen to and learn from each other and to grow their connections to nature, the arts, and their own humanity.

Tom Buesch, who teaches the festival’s free listeners master class, reminisces about attending the festival’s early concerts: “The concerts were very uncomfortable because you had to dress up to go to the tent. No man would ever go without a tie and suit coat. No woman would ever go without jewelry and wearing a dress. As a little boy, I had to wear a tie and a suit coat together with short pants because it was summertime. The tent leaked like crazy when it rained, and the canvas smelled horrible.”

Today’s listeners sit in the permanent Bayer-Benedict Music Tent, which has louvers to improve airflow and a Teflon-coated roof. Unlike the early days when concerts were performed only on Sunday, festival-goers now choose from an array of concerts, operas, recitals, chamber music, and ballets offered from late June to late August.

Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke started the festival after visiting Aspen in 1949 and purchasing one of the town’s Victorian homes. Paepcke, founder of the Container Corporation of America, was a man of action. As author Bruce Berger relates in his history of the festival, “James Hume, a Chicago lawyer who became a lifelong trustee and verbal chronicler of the festival recalled a dinner the Paepckes threw at the Chicago Racquet Club, ‘Walter announced that he was going to open up this little town called Aspen, Colorado, a place where people could gather for intellectual discussions, scenery and music.’” The Humes spent the summer of 1947 in Aspen and attended Paepcke soirees where they chatted with the Chicago Symphony’s concertmaster and harpsichordist Dorothy Layne.

The festival’s first season was a gathering originally planned to be held in Chicago. The University of Chicago’s president wanted to invite musicians and thinkers from around the globe to a 200th birthday celebration of German poet, visionary, and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Paepcke convinced planners that people attending the two-week festival in tiny Aspen, instead of Chicago, would be isolated and could focus on intellectual discussions and music. When Albert Schweitzer showed up and gave a few lectures — during his only visit to the United States — the world took notice.

“The Goethe Bicentennial, in retrospect, can be seen as Aspen’s artistic Big Bang,” Berger relates in his book. Since then, the Aspen Music Festival and School has grown exponentially. During its second year, musicians simply showed up to play. Then the school was added and students began arriving. Despite growing pains during the early 1950s, the festival and music school gradually morphed into a more structured format. At first, concerts tended to be chamber music, but as the number of musicians and students increased, so did the size of the orchestra.



When the 500-seat Joan W. and Irving B. Harris Hall opened in 1993, it was described as “Carnegie Hall in the Rockies” by The Denver Post. The permanent tent was erected in 2000, and today, the school’s main campus is in Castle Creek. When the number of students attending reached 1,100 each summer, it was felt there were too many to receive the individual attention required, says current president and CEO Alan Fletcher. He says Robert Harth, president in the mid-1990s, decided 650 students would be the right number. Since 2001, student musicians have numbered about 750 and may yet decrease to 625. “Competition is incredibly fierce. We have thousands and thousands of applications, and people only apply if they think they are very strong. Yet once here, the experience is not so competitive. It’s supportive. We feel that the level of students has been on a steady upswing. There used to be a steep difference in the skill levels between the school’s five orchestras, but now literally all are superb,” says Fletcher.

Members of the 150-person faculty are also top-drawer. “Being able to add, in the past few years, some of the world’s finest teachers, who will basically drop anything to come here, is icing on the cake of a fine faculty. My first week on the job the phone rang. It was Renée Fleming who said, ‘I know you already programmed the summer, but do you think you can squeeze me in?’” he says.

As a noted composer, Fletcher is particularly proud of the festival’s American Academy of Conducting. “It has grown tremendously to be one of the top artistic things we accomplish. Almost every week one of our conductor students wins a job somewhere in the world.”

Buesch, a professor of humanities at Colorado Mountain College, says, “One of the most wonderful things is that it’s a teaching festival. These kids are taking classes with master performers. Imagine you’re a student and can put on your resume, ‘I played in the orchestra with Joshua Bell.’” He is, he says, among the many regulars who believe one of the most exciting things about attending the festival year after year is watching musicians grow from students to professionals with world-class skills and seeing such stars as Sarah Chang play at age seven and as an adult.

The 60th anniversary season, June 25 – August 23, 2009, is full of outstanding talent. Chang is scheduled to perform along with violinist Janine Jansen, cellist Alicia Weilerstein, pianist Yefim Bronfman, violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, the American String Quartet, and the Emerson String Quartet. Natalie Cole sings during the festival’s first venture into the Pops; three Aspen Opera productions are planned, including Puccini’s La Boheme; and the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet will dance to the music of Vivaldi and Biber performed live. The 60th anniversary celebration is wrapped around soprano Deborah Voight’s debut with the Aspen Chamber Symphony, August 6.



The days when concert-goers could be distracted by horses running next to the white-and-orange circus-like tent are gone. Today, music lovers sit inside the tent or spread blankets on the grass outside. “The one thing we hope does not change is the experience of coming to Aspen because it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world to study, perform, and share music,” says Fletcher. And you can still walk by an open condo window and hear a soprano practicing an aria or Mozart played by an informal quartet among the trees alongside the Roaring Fork River.