My son (will be 16 in June), a guitarist, has been accepted to AMF for this summer. We are delighted, and I am very excited for him, and he’s all signed up. I’d really appreciate any insights anyone can provide into what to expect, especially in light of the fact that he’ll be in the classical guitar program (which is just 4 weeks, the month of August), and that he’s a high school student.
He’ll be living in the dorm. We live in WV, so we’ll drop him off, and then he’ll be on his own. (He’s very independent, so I’m not concerned about that.)
We really have no idea what to expect, and so I was googling (fruitlessly) for any insights into what he might expect to experience. I figured that there might be some folks here who have BTDT and could offer me some insights? Please?
As any other classical guitarists who live in a fairly limited geographic region might have also experienced, my son has had a rather isolated musical life. 99% of his interactions with other serious classical guitarists have simply been those with his teachers – who we’ve traveled up to 200 miles each way to get to . . . He’s met a handful of wonderful guitarists through a few competitions and masterclasses, and those have been wonderful experiences, but they were brief and those wonderful other guitarists all live very far away from us.
So, this is really a special opportunity for my son. AMF will be his first chance to work and play with other serious student guitarists for more than a long weekend. It’s really exciting.
Anyhow, and insights you can offer would be gratefully appreciated! Thanks!
I can’t speak to the classical guitar program, but my son, 19, spent last summer at Aspen and is heading there again this summer. Aspen is like any other festival–lots of opportunities to make music with like-minded students, lots of opportunities to hear fabulous music for free. Your son will live at Marolt, which is a nice living situation: three share a 2 bedroom studio-type apartment. The rooms each have a shower, toilet, and a refrigerator. (It’s housing for temporary ski employees in the winter). He took his bike and enjoyed exploring the beautiful the surroundings. The weather in Aspen is so comfortable in the summer: cool and dry. Our whole family caught the recital for Sharon Isbin’s guitar students at the end of the festival. The recital was mostly ensembles: duets, trios, etc. and the music was amazing! I hope your S gets to study with her.
Thank you @dec51995 ! Sharon Isbin runs the whole guitar program (I think she has just one assistant teacher) and teaches all the master classes (and most of the private lessons), so, yes, my son will surely get to study with her, which is a phenomenal opportunity. I am jealous that you all got to see the guitar recital at the end of the program! For financial reasons, I am planning on my son just flying home solo at the end (we’ll be dropping him off in person, as part of a big family road trip), but, man it will be rough to miss all the recitals. If my son ends up having some significant parts of the recital, I may just have to TRY to figure out a way to get out there myself for that! It’ll be painful to miss the whole experience!
I am glad to hear your son enjoyed biking there. My son loves to bike! I’d like my son to have a bike there . . . His own bike is a very nice mtn bike (high end hand-me-down from my very generous brother who upgraded his spoiled girl friend’s bike, lol), that would be a bit of a maintenance and security issue in addition to being expensive and trouble to get there and back from the east coast, but I’m thinking maybe I should just buy him a cheap bike for the month . . . Hmmmm . . . Can you ask your son if he thinks a “good” ($1000+) mountain bike would be much better than a cheap bike for the kind of biking generally available as a student there? Is it mainly tooling around on roads and dirt roads? Or serious mtn biking? Or would having a good bike be a stressor to keep it locked/etc when tooling around town? (I know I’d never send that nice a bike to a college town, for instance, as if you left it outside a restaurant, even locked, you’d be likely to come back to a a missing seat post or missing wheel, etc. . .)
Hi @mmom99. We missed all of S’s orchestra concerts, even though we stayed a week after dropping him off and arrived 5 days early for the end of the festival. The problem with driving out is that not much music is going on that first week. I got to attend the convocation, and we caught the final AFO concert on the lawn for free–rain included! S brought his digital recorder and taped rehearsals throughout the summer. He thought Robert Spano was hilarious and tried to catch some of his jokes on tape. He skyped us about once a week and would load a recording and we’d listen to it together, so by the end of the summer, I felt like I had experienced some of Aspen with him. Orchestra concerts are professsionally recorded at Aspen and those recordings are available to students to buy. One of S’s concerts was recorded and aired on Performance Today–not during the festival but sometime this past fall. S and I were in the car driving somewhere and just happened to catch it. I almost drove off the road in my excitement!
S is only a recreational biker and he stayed on the roads. He brought his cheap mountain/street hybird. There’s an awning over the housing facilitites and pillars to chain bikes to so they stay out of the rain. The concert facilities are in the town of Aspen, which is a 10-15 min bike ride from Marolt (there’s an off-road bike path). And some rehearsal space and practice rooms are up Castle Creek Road at the Aspen Country Day School. S biked that road (no shoulder–winding–scary) every day. Students can get by without a bike. There are free buses to and from Aspen and the Country Day School–and all the way up to Snowmass, but S likes his freedom to come and go so he prefers his bike. Marolt also has several practice rooms available on site. There are mountain bike paths galore–bikers buy a gondola ticket and carry their mountain bikes up the slopes with them and then bike down. There are also many relatively flat paved bike paths to explore around Aspen. I would imagine there are lots of bike rental places, too.
Word of warning: drugs and alcohol are readily available. There are lots of older students at Aspen and they have parties in town, to which the younger students are invited. I think Marolt might group roommates by age because S’s two roomies were also 18–and one habitually came home drunk. Since your S is underaged, you might want to have the talk before he goes. I know this stuff happens everywhere, but compared to the other festivals S attended (Interlochen, Tanglewood) Aspen has an entirely different level of freedom. o_0
Glad to hear your S will study with Sharon Isbin. She’s amazing, and he’ll have a blast!
