Carol Christ, trustee

Famously called “the music of friends,” chamber music creates community—the community of musicians playing, one on a part—a conversation, as Goethe observed—and the community of listeners. Marlboro has such community at its very soul. It brings together musicians—young and old, teacher and student—in a summer community in a magical place in the southern Vermont woods, where they live, eat, learn, and play together. The weekend concerts are simply the outgrowth of the work that takes place among the musicians… yet the concerts extend the community further—to the listeners, who gather to hear their work. There’s a luminosity to Marlboro, and an intensity—perhaps because each ensemble, each chamber grouping of musicians, is unique for that piece. As an audience member you come to listen not to an established ensemble—the Juilliard, the Emerson—but the musicians of Marlboro and the work they create together.