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Nov 9 - Dec 31, 2023

Big Sur Fiddle Camp

Mission

Our Mission is to imbue young musicians with a deeper connection to music by providing an unforgettable music education experience.

The Big Idea

June 2023 Big Sur Fiddle Camp produced a full scale musical, capping three years of composing music and songs. Needing a theater space with good acoustics, we took the show to Carmel. Our theatrical offshoot of teaching music camps, helped demonstrate the need to build the legacy project in Big Sur of a Cultural and Ecology Center.

Teaching art, music, science, drama, film making, organic gardening, etc in our own homes and at the Grange is sweet, but not sustainable. Having a bricks and mortar place that the community can call their own and programs can flourish for more than a few years is what we have needed for decades.

Big Sur has had this goal for over 30 years. It is timely to act on it before the rich programs we have now disappear for lack of a permanent space to house them.

The glorious reverberations from Camp are still ringing in my soul. Big Sur Fiddle Camp, from my perspective, was an unqualified success, a stellar event in so many ways: The teaching was incredible, the way that the different teachers literally and figuratively bounced off each other, creating new inspirational events right on the spot. The camp was one big kitchen where mad genius musical cooks were creating new musical dishes day and night. The cooking and the eating (the musical creating and the listening/appreciating) became indistinguishable. What a joy is was to watch such an interesting and wide variety of young ones, from around the country and the world, find their own ways into the community that was forming. Instructors William and Edwin with Folk Baroque, Georgy with the Balkan tunes, Kristin and Elise and Nicholas singing and songwriting, The Onlys, Phoebe and Dominick bluegrass, blues, old time and rock.

- Rick Chelew