Photography by: Ferenc Berko

ASPEN MUSIC FESTIVAL AND SCHOOL TURNS 60

The hills are (still) alive

Sixty years later, the Aspen Music Festival & School continues to make summertime Aspen unlike anywhere else on earth.

“The difficulty of our time,” the notes begin, “is a difficulty of the human spirit. … Things seem to be bigger; they do not seem to be better.” Timely though they may sound, these words were written, not last week, but more than half a century ago. They began the 160-page souvenir program for a rather unlikely event called the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation and Music Festival, held in 1949. Great thinkers and talents would convene in June and July that year for a series of lectures, discussions, and seminars — “a community of minds” — accompanied by daily music recitals and orchestral performances. Heady stuff for an isolated, little-known, one-time silver-mining town by the name of Aspen.

Like most things cultural in Aspen’s last 60 years, that occasion, and what it evolved into, can be traced back to the vision and initiative of the Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke and his wife, Elizabeth, progenitors of “the Aspen Idea.” The couple looked at the dusty old relic of a former boom mining town and pictured a mecca of refinement and the lively exchange of ideas, set to a musical soundtrack worthy of the breathtaking natural setting. “Here is a community in peace,” those 1949 program notes concluded seven years after World War II, “centered in America, with opportunities for man’s complete life… where he can earn a living, profit by a healthy physical recreation, with facilities at hand for his enjoyment of art, music and education.” Works by marquee composers were played: Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn, Schubert. Arthur Rubenstein came as featured pianist, and got his picture taken, famously, riding the Ajax chairlift. Some 2,000 people (more than the population of Aspen) attended the Bicentennial program, and word soon spread: Something special was going on up here.
Needless to say, the concept caught on, the music as much as anything. The 60 years that have passed have seen an astonishing flood of talent come and go through the Valley: Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Benny Goodman, to name a few, and Duke Ellington, Itzhak Perlman, and the acclaimed conductor (and artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera) James Levine, who first came to Aspen as a child prodigy. The school — now more than 750 students strong each summer — has groomed thousands of skilled musicians internationally even as it has left an indelible mark on the town. That first festival’s three weekly concerts have ballooned into more than 400 events over the nine-week summer season, enshrining Aspen, in the words of various observers over the years, as “Juilliard West,” and “the American Salzburg.” At the same time, the festival and school have created an unlikely roster of ski-town jobs: full-time music instructors, program-note writers, luthiers (who make and repair stringed instruments), a small army of piano tuners, and physical therapists treating the physical stresses of playing instruments.

But perhaps more than anything, the Aspen Music Festival & School each summer continues to address that fundamental need identified those 60 years ago: to lift the human spirit with inspiring sounds in an inspiring setting. In difficult times or prosperous, that need is constant. As the Festival & School enters its seventh decade and beyond, let the music play on.