Musicorda Celebrates a Decade of Dedication to Music

Cellist Wilhelmina Smith will perform as guest artist at the final concert of Musicorda's tenth anniversary year. Fittingly, the former Amherst resident was also a soloist at Musicorda's very first concert, in 1987.

Musicorda's concerts feature internationally known musicians--including some former students--who are in demand on the world's great concert stages. Some current students have already played at Carnegie Hall and have their own recordings. "We're known coast-to-coast and in other countries as the equal of Tanglewood and Aspen music festivals for soloists and chamber music," says Jackie Melnick, the festival's administrative director. Yet their courses and concerts are better known in the Berkshires and Britain than right here on campus.

Perhaps people may not be clear on what Musicorda does because it does so much. The summer festival is run by Melnick (MHC professor emeritus of music) and her husband Terry Teraspulsky (Musicorda's artistic director and UMass professor emeritus of music), and includes four major initiatives:

There are two weekly concerts throughout the summer, the "Festival Series" and "Young Artist Series" performances. Renowned professional musicians perform each Friday in the Festival Series, which includes preconcert discussions about each evening's offerings and postconcert receptions with the artists. In Musicorda's ten summers, "393 compositions have been played in festival concerts; and 122 different composers' works have been played, including fifty-nine twentieth-century composers and thirty-nine American composers."

The Young Artist Series features free Sunday evening concerts by talented students who are training in the Musicorda Summer String Program. This year, eighty gifted students came from fourteen countries to perfect their musical skills. Three former students, now professional musicians, appear in this year's Festival Series: Andrew Ruben, Joji Hattori, and Amherst native Wilhelmina Smith.

In addition to these concerts, Melnick and Teraspulsky are committed to a vigorous outreach program taking classical music to a wide variety of audiences. Students in the Musicorda Road Company play live music in community centers, day camps, churches, libraries, museums, and other Western Massachusetts community sites. They also teach children in inner-city Holyoke through the Children's String Workshop. The two dozen or so concerts given by students each year give Musicorda pupils performance experience and enrich audiences' cultural experiences. Listeners in some communities, Melnick says, had never heard a violin before. "After the concert we let the kids hold a violin, and some of them--five years later--are playing and practicing their own instruments," she adds.

A schedule of upcoming Musicorda concerts is included in the calendar section of this CSJ issue. For further information, call 538-2590.