Aspen Music Festival

One of the great American summer music festivals — eight weeks of classical concerts in a tent on the Aspen Meadows

For eight weeks from late June to late August, Aspen hosts one of the most ambitious classical music festivals in North America. About 400 events take place across the festival's various stages, with the centrepiece concerts in the iconic Benedict Music Tent on the Aspen Meadows campus. The performing roster mixes the resident Aspen Festival Orchestra and Aspen Chamber Symphony with leading guest soloists and conductors.

A core part of the festival is its student music school — about 600 conservatory-age musicians spend the summer in Aspen, and their student-orchestra concerts are often as good as the professional ones. Many of the events are free or low-cost; tickets to the major orchestral concerts in the tent sell out months ahead. The lawn outside the tent is open seating during the concerts — bring a blanket, a bottle of wine, and listen through the open sides of the tent.

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A story
The festival was founded in 1949 by the Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke, who had bought up much of post-mining Aspen with the idea of building a centre for "mind, body, and spirit." The opening event was a 200th-birthday celebration of Goethe headlined by Albert Schweitzer and Thornton Wilder. The Music Festival was one of three institutions Paepcke founded that summer; the others were the Aspen Institute and the International Design Conference.