They were my first tour situations. It was my first time in cities such as Philadelphia and Boston. I learned what is was like to drive through snow drifts in order to make a concert on time. I learned about adjusting to different halls and different audience responses. Philosophically, the festival had a profound influence on our musical development, and touring extended the impact of the summer into the regular season…(we) grew both personally and musically.

I think that’s the important thing about Marlboro that we carry with us, that we keep with us the spirit here through the darkest days of the winter, not only in terms of weather and traveling in it, but when we go back into the world of professional music, professional life and all the things that we have to encounter there to be able to take with us what we have here, which is the opportunity which I consider just the most luxurious thing that our artists can have: to be in a place to be fed, cared for, housed, and work, just work.

That’s the thing that artists before our present era were able to do more. Summer was never for touring and festivals; it was for study and rest, besides which they took trains everywhere, and they had time to read and to study. We move so fast now that we don’t have the kind of time that we do in this blessed place where we can live simply, which is the very important part of the philosophy here that it’s not, it’s not a physical luxury, but it’s a spiritual, mental, and artistic intellectual luxury to study to become students.