2024 brings a summer of reckoning with, indulging in, and celebrating our planet, its beauty and fragility, and our fraught relationship to it. We’ll share in music that conjures a sense of place, of environment, and of the mystery and majesty of the natural world. Featuring works by John Luther Adams, in whose gorgeous soundscapes nature becomes audible (our title for the summer is a pun on his orchestral masterwork, Become Ocean), as well as music of Carter; Debussy; Faure; Mozart; Schumann; the premiere of Andrew Waggoner’s love letter to New Orleans and coastal Lousiana, Lovely, Lost…; and Trevor Weston’s celebration of land, legacy and culture, Juba. All this, and an improvised score to the beloved classic Nanook of the North. Come to listen, to feel, to be absorbed into the great whole. Become Music. Check back soon for detailed concert info.

Artistic Directors’ Message

Become Music

One of the great blessings in being part of WCM is the chance to make music every summer in the Catskills, a place of unique and shimmering beauty. Its harmony of water, light and variegated hills seems to amplify and radiate back to us the harmonies bursting from our instruments, as if the earth itself were sharing the stage with us. That this creative partnership is, like all ecosystems everywhere, fragile, threatened, vulnerable to attack, is not news. The question we face, every day, is what can we do about it? As artists we have one avenue open to us, one abiding responsibility, one great privilege: to bear witness. Not to preach or harangue or point fingers, but simply to listen, to hear and feel the earth’s great turning made manifest as music, and thereby to be reminded that it is us and we are it: no separation, nowhere to hide. Music has always channeled the earth’s power, whether explicitly, as in the prelude to Haydn’s Creation, or implicitly, as in Beethoven’s Fifth. In its cyclical rhythmic pulsing, its weather patterns of fast- or slow-moving harmonies, its cresting and ebbing of sound, it makes the interlacing of forces and systems that drive life itself audible to us in a direct experience of beauty, majesty and, sometimes, terror. We have it all this summer, from the almost intoxicating magic of John Luther Adams’ Canticles of the Sky, to the Hunt Quartet of Mozart, to Juba, Trevor Weston’s rumination on the importance of land, of growing and harvesting, to African-American culture and legacy. We invite you all to join us, to listen with us, to Become Music with us.

Love,
Andy & Carrie

Our Mission

Highlights from our 2021 Season, Into the Light

Ludwig van Beethoven, Heiliger Dankgesang, from Quartet Op. 132
Nurit Pacht & Mari Sato, violins; Kathryn Lockwood, viola; Caroline Stinson, cello

Kurt Rohde, 4 Remixes, for piano trio
Sunghae Anna Lim, violin; Caroline Stinson, cello; Ieva Jokubaviciute, piano

Rohde, Inside Voice, for string quartet
Nurit Pacht & Mari Sato, violins; Kathryn Lockwood, viola; Caroline Stinson, cello

Andrew Waggoner, Now, the Fire (Movement for piano quartet after James Baldwin)
Mari Sato, violin; Kathryn Lockwood, viola; Caroline Stinson, cello; Ieva Jokubaviciute, piano

GENERAL INFORMATION

Weekend of Chamber Music, Inc.
PO Box 147
Jeffersonville, N.Y. 12748

INFORMATION
(917) 664-5185

Homepage image: The Lotus Eaters, Mosaic work by Laurel True, New Orleans, www.truemosaics.com, @laureltrue3