In 2025 Alan Fletcher has been selected to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the category of Scientific, Cultural, and Nonprofit Leadership.
Summer 2025 continues our celebration of our 75th: 2024 was the anniversary of the first summer of music in Aspen, but 2026 will be the anniversary of the incorporation of what we now call the Aspen Music Festival and School. This progression expresses the fact that teaching and learning together are the heart of our endeavor. Young musicians from all over the world come to Aspen to work side by side with our faculty, who are dedicated to ensuring the future of our precious and unique art form.
Each summer we choose a theme to inspire our work throughout the season, and in 2025 that theme is Concerning the Spiritual in Art. This was the title of a book by the painter Wassily Kandinsky. His ideas inspired Herbert Bayer to join the Bauhaus in Germany, and Bayer’s work became the foundation for much of the creation of modern Aspen. Kandinsky was also a close friend of Arnold Schoenberg and music was of the greatest importance to him. In his book Kandinsky is not interested in spirituality as the province of sectarian religion, but rather in spirituality as a realm of experience, thought, and action beyond the day to day, beyond the literal. Our season brings to the stage music that is numinous—glowing with possibility, aspiration, inquiry, belief, and confidence. When our concern is for the spiritual, we are ready for danger and goodness, difficulty and meaning.
There will be music that is spiritual in the most obvious way: Handel’s Messiah, Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony, etc. There will be music of more subtle spirituality: Messiaen’s birdsong, Holst’s Planets, and much more. At the heart of the summer will be an extraordinary world premiere: Siddhartha, She, created by Chris Theofanidis and Melissa Studdard with a brilliant team of visual, movement, and sound artists inspired by Hermann Hesse’s novel. We are proud that, after seventy-five years, Aspen continues to be a place celebrating what is new, and deep, and full of hope.
