Pablo Casals, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Isaac Stern have served on the Board of Trustees. Tom Hulce, Peter Sparling, Mike Wallace, and Linda Hunt are alumni. Lorin Maazel conducted the symphony orchestra at age nine, standing atop of box at the front of the open-air theater. Nestled deep in northern Michigan's lake country, the Interlochen Center for the Arts has been turning out world-class musicians and artists under the guidance of the world's best conductors and composers for the past sixty years.
The rural, 1,200-acre campus houses both the Interlochen Arts Academy, the first private arts high school in the country, and the national Music Camp, also the nation's first. Over the years both Interlochen institutions have ranked among the most prestigious, with graduates playing in nearly every major American symphony orchestra. And while a majority of the 2,000 students come from all 50 states, 13 percent travel from the distant corners of the world: from Saudi Arabia and Israel, Taiwan and Shanghai, the Costa Rican jungle and the Nova Scotia seashore. There are punk rockers from Tokyo and preppies from Toronto.
The Interlochen campus is planted in a thick stand of Norwegian pines, an island of sound and motion in the stillness of the countryside. Brass, strings, and a chorus of voices rise in the cool forest air. From a dormitory window the rhythmic pulse of a practicing jazz ensemble spills onto the concourse. In a frame cabin on the lakeshore, lines of dancers move across the polished wooden floor. Nearby, a crowd gathers to applaud a string quartet as they rehearse Mozart. Winding along the sand pathways hundreds of stone and log cabins are set up for lessons and practices - violins here; drums there; five hundred pianos; and an entire hall of harpists.
Backstage in the open-air auditorium students warm up their instruments and voices before a concert. Tenors and sopranos. Violins, cellos, violas, basses. Some will end up on stage with the New York Metropolitan Opera; others will return to their hometowns to conduct community bands. While they are at Interlochen their navy corduroy uniform knickers and their desire to practice and perform bind them together. Their Mohawks and cornrows, their penny loafers and woven straw slippers give clues to their uniqueness.
Two years ago, seventeen-year-old classical clarinetist Vinicio Meza was dodging coconuts that moneys threw at him as he sat under a tree in his Costa Rican backyard, practicing scales and solfeggio (singing notes). Today he plays his clarinet six hours a day in the practice rooms and on the stages of Interlochen concert halls with his fellow orchestra, chamber music, and jazz band students. Sometimes the piece they are rehearsing is one of Vinicio's own compositions.
Vinicio's journey from the Central American jungle to Interlochen's woods began when he was eight years old and his father, a music teacher, bought him a wooden recorder. By the time he was ten, Vinicio had advanced to the clarinet and was on his way to performing with his provincial band. He finished school at fifteen and was attending a summer music camp in Costa Rica when a former Interlochen clarinet teacher heard him play and ran to a telephone to call Mary Gray Bozanic, academy admissions director.
Two years later as Vinicio
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