Deep Focus: Enriching the Aspen Experience

"Children’s Music at The Aspen Music Festival” by Kate Hamori addresses the enduring and varied roles that childhood plays in classical music. Children—as performers, intended audiences, and direct sources of creative inspiration for adult-composers—inadvertently exert tangible influence over the classical canon as we know it. Furthermore, many adult composers, at one point or another, write works based on their own childhood memories, either to simply reminisce or as a means by which to cope with their adulthood struggles. While it is easy to think of children and childhood as afterthoughts in the arts, Hamori demonstrates how children play a significant role in shaping musical culture, and that childhood is an inescapable part of classical music's legacy.

"Sounds of Pride: Queer Musical Identities, Histories, and Belonging” by Dr. Kristin Franseen explores how music shapes queer identity in the U.S. from the from the twentieth century to today. From Copland’s Appalachian Spring, to Strayhorn’s re-imagined Tchaikovsky, to Oliveros's playful critique of Beethoven, these composers challenge norms, redefine tradition, and celebrate diverse voices in classical music.

Explore an artist's view of Vienna's musical vanguard, tragically lost before its time, in a new Deep Focus essay on Richard Gerstl. The painter had personal relationships to the composers Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Zemlinsky, and others in their circle.

This deeply researched essay by Dr. Kirsten Paige outlines the ways humanity has defined nature as a category in opposition to the human, and what role music has played in that project. She argues that categorizing humanity (including the arts, like music) as distinct from unruly or “wild” nature has led to environmental exploitation and racial discrimination, while works by new composers wrestle with and try to overcome this legacy.

In this short essay, Professor Denise von Glahn guides the reader in noticing the ways the natural world is present in both familiar and new music, and indeed in appreciating the natural beauty that surrounds us at every concert at the Tent.