Green Mountain Chamber Students Work Hard and Play Hard on the Idyllic Shores of Lake Champlain

By Greg Cahill | From the September-October issue of Strings Magazine

Three years ago, violinist and violist Jasper Sewell, 16, trekked to the bucolic Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival in Colchester, Vermont, searching for intensive coaching, a chance to commune with other young string players, and solace. “I think this sort of climate gives me clarity and peace of mind, lessening my overall level of stress and thereby reducing tension in my playing,” the now-19-year-old says of the four-week excursion. 

It proved to be a rewarding experience.

At the lakeside music camp, Sewell, and three other students (Ella Eom, violin; Julie Kim, violin; and Ari Peraza-Webb, cello), formed the FaMa Quartet, which would go on to win the junior strings division of the 2023 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, a major stepping stone toward a career in chamber music. “I believe it helped that we were performing from memory,” Sewell says. “Professor [Bayla] Keyes [a coach and founding violinist of the Muir Quartet] had always emphasized the importance of finding what she called ‘a great ball of sound’ in the middle that we sent outward to the very back of the hall. Without the physical barrier of music stands, we were able to more easily find this ball of sound, which helped build our energy and confidence even more.”

The annual Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival offers world-class coaching during a four-week summer session held from mid-June to mid-July. The organization was founded in 2004 by violinist Kevin Lawrence in the Lake Champlain and Burlington, Vermont, area. It is now located at St. Michael’s College in nearby Colchester and brings together young string players from around the United States and several other countries with professional string teachers from numerous conservatories and universities. 

“Given how much we pack into the four weeks, it is inevitably an intense experience, but it is also joyful and transformative,” says artistic director and violinist Elizabeth Chang. “Some students come to prepare for auditions or concerts; some to burrow into their technical fundamentals; some come because their teachers or parents thought it was a good idea. These students have no idea what’s in store for them and frequently emerge transformed by the sense of possibility and a brand-new love for chamber music. We make it a priority to try to create a positive and supportive environment—practice hours are 8:00 am to noon, and students are here because they want to work hard—but we don’t want them to experience the schedule as punitive.”

The 2024 program set an attendance record with 224 students assigned to 58 quartets. “The logistics are formidable, but we do divide the afternoon into two rehearsal and coaching sessions for scheduling and room-availability reasons,” Chang says. “The days are very structured, what with the four hours of practice in the morning, a chamber-music rehearsal or coaching in the afternoon, a late-afternoon presentation or master class, and concerts every night.”

The coaching staff is drawn from some of the world’s most acclaimed professional quartets and teaching faculty. “The teaching credentials we have among the faculty are extraordinary. Some faculty are renowned for their work with high school–aged students, others for their work with graduate students,” Chang says. “We have faculty who were or are members of some of the most respected ensembles in the business—current or former members of the Miró, Muir, Lydian, Aizuri, and Harlem Quartets, as well as the Peabody and Champlain Trios. All of our faculty are active chamber musicians; some are current or former members of major orchestras such as Cleveland, Dallas, Minnesota, and the Orpheus.” 

In addition, the 2024 faculty included three guest quartets that gave master classes and concerts, as well as master violinists Joseph Lin and Astrid Schween, formerly and currently of the Juilliard Quartet, respectively. “I should add that we as faculty also value the opportunity to experiment with our pedagogical methods in this concentrated setting,” Chang adds, “to be stimulated by lunchtime conversations with our colleagues about teaching issues and to relish collaborating in performance with one another.”

But it’s not all work and no play. Students also enjoy recreational activities along Malletts Bay, part of Lake Champlain, as well as weekend field trips to the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory, Six Flags Great Escape, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne Farms, Mount Mansfield, and the waterfront Fourth of July fireworks display in downtown Burlington.

Creating Chemistry

One major project for organizers is the assignment of attendees to student string quartets, a meticulous process that involves interviews, audition tapes, and other means. “We have an enormously wide range of students at different points in their studies,” Chang notes. “Some are essentially young professionals—others are in the early stages of serious study. We have to match ages, levels of instrumental control, compatibility of sound production, and experience. Once the students are roughly sorted according to those parameters, there are different kinds of groups that can work—sometimes we have very even groups, other times we might have a more seasoned player in a leadership role with smart players who are possibly less experienced but who clearly have great instincts and a solid technique. Sometimes it seems like a certain personality won’t thrive as a leader this summer—other times it seems that the time has come for the more diffident player to step into their own.” 

Once the groups have been formed, the coaches enter the process. “I give them the information I have with individual video links and levels of experience, as well as age, grade, teacher, and school background,” Chang says. “During this critical phase, the coaches enter into what can sometimes be a very extended conversation with the group to find a piece that is a suitable fit. We want the students to have a realistic chance of learning an entire work and performing it at the highest level possible at this point in their development.”

Sewell recalls the awkwardness of his first foray into Green Mountain’s learning process. “Our first meeting was incredibly strange, indeed!” he says of his assignments to two different groups. “I am primarily a violinist but had some experience playing viola in chamber-music settings beforehand, so I elected to play violin in one group and viola in the other. My viola group is the one that later became FaMa, but it hardly seemed like we would have much success after our first rehearsal. 

“We had decided to learn Mendelssohn’s Sixth String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80 [the group ultimately took its name from the piece’s F-minor key], and because we had a coaching session on the first day of the festival, we thought it wise to go ahead and run the first movement beforehand. We all crowded into Ari’s dorm room, played through the first movement once, and left for the coaching. No one said a word. It was probably the most awkward rehearsal dynamic you could have possibly imagined, and we had only just begun and still had to continue playing together for the next four weeks.”

Keyes’ coaching proved instrumental in lessening that initial awkwardness right from the beginning. “Right as we walked into our first coaching, she told us that professor Kevin Lawrence, the festival’s artistic director at the time, had high hopes for us as a group and that she would work relentlessly to get us in the best shape possible, so we could fulfill these hopes,” Sewell says. “After we played through the first movement of the Mendelssohn, she told us to memorize not only our own parts, but each other’s parts as well. This helped us become much more efficient in rehearsals because rather than having to discuss the function of each part in a particular section, we were able to discover this on our own time and figure out our respective roles based on the other parts. As a result, most of our rehearsals and coachings going forward were focused specifically toward refining our collective interpretation of the work. 

“Professor Keyes maintained a certain type of energy throughout coachings that, while vigorous and highly demanding, was always positive and encouraged us to enjoy every step of the process,” Sewell continues. “As we applied these concepts to our rehearsals, the initial awkwardness quickly dissipated, and we became fiercely determined to prepare the entire quartet as quickly as we could. Professor Keyes secured us a performance of the entire Mendelssohn during the third week of the festival, and it was through this performance that we fully discovered our collective chemistry and spark as a group. 

“It is impossible to explain this feeling with words—we can only say that we as individuals became fully and completely subservient to the group’s energy during the performance, and it inspired all of us in a way that no other musical experience had ever inspired us before.”

A Holistic Experience

After attending the Jacobs School of Music summer program in Indiana, Harpa International Music Academy in Iceland, the Meadowmount School of Music in upstate New York, and the Hilton Head Chamber Music Institute in South Carolina, Sewell returned to Green Mountain this year through the Fellowship program. “My experience at Green Mountain has been musically and spiritually enriching in ways I could never have foreseen. I believe that Green Mountain places the strongest emphasis on chamber music of any of the festivals I’ve attended, and this is a major reason I continue to return there,” he says. 

“What I also appreciate about Green Mountain is that students are given a significant degree of flexibility in their schedules—while practice hours, lessons, chamber-music rehearsals, coachings, master classes, and concerts are all re-quired, there is usually still time to socialize with peers, which generally creates a more relaxed and inviting atmosphere. The side effect of this is that the students are much more supportive and encouraging of each other’s musical endeavors as well, and it is always wonderful to be part of a community that prioritizes these values.”

Creating a richly rewarding personal experience that includes, but extends beyond, musical instruction is the ultimate aim of the Green Mountain staff. “Our amazing resident-life staff makes every effort to create a welcoming and supportive environment for our students day to day, hosting a number of weekly activities such as pick-up soccer games, game nights, and, this year, a contradance for our younger students,” says Chang, who has taught at Green Mountain since 2007. “We know our students attend Green Mountain to work hard, but we are in beautiful Vermont in the summertime, after all. We understand the balance between working hard and relaxing hard, and we are lucky to be able to showcase this beautiful state to our students.

“I think I speak for my colleagues when I say that there is nothing quite like watching the light go on in a student’s eyes—and I have seen this happen many times in my years at this festival to students at differing stages of development and under differing circumstances. When we return to our respective schools in the fall, students often have a fresh sense of purpose, a new realization of the rewards they might reap from their own work, and an edge on their appetite for experiencing chamber music. That’s definitely the greatest reward.”