Interlochen: Where America's Young Artists Come to Play
Near Traverse City, Michigan
Tucked between two small northern Michigan lakes, the Interlochen Center for the Arts occupies twelve hundred acres of pine forest that have been reshaping American music and theater for nearly a century.
The story begins in nineteen twenty-six, when a University of Michigan music professor named Joseph Maddy pulled together two hundred high school musicians from across the country for a single performance at the Music Supervisors National Conference in Detroit. The crowd was stunned. Someone asked whether he could do it again, every summer, somewhere these students could actually live and study together. Maddy said yes, bought a narrow strip of land between Green and Duck Lakes, and on June twenty-fourth, nineteen twenty-eight, one hundred and fifteen teenagers arrived from every corner of the United States to form the first National High School Orchestra Camp. Faculty outnumbered students by a factor of nearly one to five.
What Maddy understood, and what the place still embodies, is that artistic gifts are wasted without a community of equally serious peers. The cornet player from rural Ohio would never meet the oboist from New Orleans back home. At Interlochen they rehearsed together, ate together, lived in the same bunks, and pushed each other to a standard none of them could have reached alone.
For decades the camp operated only in summer. Then in nineteen sixty-two, Interlochen opened the first independent boarding high school devoted entirely to the arts in the United States. That institution, the Interlochen Arts Academy, has since produced a remarkable fraction of the country's professional performers. Surveys estimate that roughly ten percent of musicians playing in America's top orchestras passed through this campus at some point.
The alumni list runs from the serious to the famous: opera singer Jessye Norman, singer-songwriter Norah Jones, Josh Groban, and performers across every discipline. The conductor Lorin Maazel attended. So did the actor Linda Hunt.
The program has always been free in spirit if not always in fee. Maddy spent years scraping for funds, sometimes mortgaging the property to keep it running. The institution survived every financial crisis, in part because the music itself convinced donors that something real was happening out here between the pines.
