Summer Camp

In High School, as part of my rebellion against marching band and marching band culture and marching, I went to an Early Music workshop over several summers, up in the mountain retreat of Idyllwild, California. Although the experience of performing sections of the Machaut Mass or Isaac's devastating lament, Quis dabit capiti meo aquam or figuring out how to get my awkward adolescent 6'4" frame to do a bransle were perhaps as important to my musical thinking as any composition lessons, I never really had a composers' summer camp experience. Places like Tanglewood or Aspen had been long shut off to experimental music and were preserves of other networks of teachers and students, the Burdocks and Chocorua Festivals were one-offs and slightly before my time, the Cabrillo Festival of '80 was not a training program, and the Ostrava Days were far in the future, a real gift for the next experimental generation. By the time I got to Darmstadt, in '90, I had already grown out of my happy camper phase, and was happy enough to watch the complexifiers kick dust around in Gut City. I reckon it as a loss that I didn't have the direct exchange with my contemporaries that comes about in these summer programs, but perhaps this blogging enterprise has made up somewhat for this lost episode in my youth: Renewable Music, my virtual summer camp.