Contents
I. Upcoming Deadline: Yellow Barn's New Residency Program
II. "Not-Knowing"—An introduction to our April 12th Concert in Boston
III. Previewing our upcoming garden & buildings campaign
IV. Video excerpts from our January Artist Residency concert
Dates of Note
March 12—Last call for Yellow Barn's audience survey Complete this 5-minute survey
April 1—Application Deadline: Residency for Non-Professional Musicians
April 12—Music For Food Partnership Concert (Boston, MA)
November 7—Yellow Barn at Wigmore Hall (London, England)
2026 Summer Season
Tickets on sale April 1st | Sign up for updates
Young Artists Program Concerts: June 21-July 3, 2026
Yellow Barn Festival Concerts: July 10-August 8, 2026
Helena Tulve, Composer in Residence: August 3-8, 2026
Yellow Barn's NEW Residency Program
Yellow Barn Residency for Non-Professional Musicians
for serious avocational string players and pianists
Seth Knopp, Artistic Director
October 10-18, 2026
Application deadline: April 1
More information
Yellow Barn's campus at the Greenwood School
This fall, Yellow Barn will embark on a new adventure: a one-week intensive for serious avocational musicians wishing to explore the magic of chamber music led by Yellow Barn festival faculty and guest speakers from a variety of fields.
Over a week in October, selected musicians will work with faculty in pre-formed groups, exploring great works from the chamber music canon. The goals of this session are several: to embrace the community of avocational musicians who approach music with seriousness of purpose and passion, but who chose not to make it their profession; to focus on the greatness of the music itself, rather than solely performance or presentation; and to cultivate a community of musicians and supporters who can experience the magic that is Yellow Barn. The intensive is aimed at the original definition of the word "amateur": one who loves music, rather than the modern notion of a non-professional musician. If successful, the hope is to repeat this program each year, furthering Yellow Barn's reach into the community of music lovers.
—Steven Frucht, Board Member and Residency Guest Speaker
"Not-Knowing"—An Introduction to our April 12th Concert
Music for Food Partnership Concert
Sunday, April 12, 2026
7:00pm | New England Conservatory of Music, Boston
All proceeds will support Women’s Lunch Place
Program includes Beethoven's An die Hoffnung, Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time), and works by Kurtág, including selections from Játékok (Games) and Schumann's Kinderszenen, with transcriptions of J.S. Bach
This past summer at Yellow Barn, two sets of pieces were programmed that are most often described as “pedagogical”: Luciano Berio’s Duetti and György Kurtág’s Játékok (Games). After all, both Berio and Kurtág indicated as much. Still, you might justly ask what makes these pieces “pedagogical”, and Johann Sebastian Bach’s two- and three-part Inventions, or his Goldberg Variations for that matter, not pedagogical.
I would hazard to say that “pedagogical” has come to represent works, or an approach to learning them, that is purely “educational” …uh-oh, another one! And maybe both Berio and Kurtág would ask what the quibble is, but I believe that they would also say that Bach’s two- and three-part Inventions and his Goldberg Variations, and everything else he wrote are also “pedagogical”, and that, in fact, so are every one of their works!
Berio says that his Duetti are composed with all levels of violin playing in mind, and we automatically assume that learning is a one-way street, the accomplished leading the less accomplished, the knowing teaching the un-knowing.
But about his Játékok, Kurtág writes:
The idea of composing games was suggested by children playing spontaneously, children for whom the piano still means a toy. They experiment with it, caress it, attack it and run their fingers over it. They pile up seemingly disconnected sounds, and if this happens to arouse their musical instinct they look consciously for some of the harmonies found by chance and keep repeating them. Thus, this series does not provide a tutor, nor does it simply stand as a collection of pieces. It is a possibility for experimenting and not for learning “to play the piano."
How advanced we are at “playing the piano” does not assume a correlation with how we convey “meaning” to an audience. In fact, Kurtág seems to imply the opposite may often be true!
“… a possibility for experimenting and not for learning “to play the piano”.?! Should this not be true of all music? And if it is true for all music, what purpose does the word “pedagogical” serve other than the context in which we encounter it, or how we ourselves are enlightened by it?
Enjoy reading what the writer Donald Barthelme, and Luciano Berio have to say about “knowing” and “meaning” in their 2 pieces below.
—Seth Knopp
From Donald Barthelme’s Not-Knowing:
Let us suppose that someone is writing a story. From the world of conventional signs he takes an azalea bush, plants it in a pleasant park. He takes a gold pocket watch from the world of conventional signs and places it under the azalea bush. He takes from the same rich source a handsome thief and a chastity belt, places the thief in the chastity belt and lays him tenderly under the azalea, not neglecting to wind the gold pocket watch so that its ticking will, at length, awaken the now sleeping thief. From the Sarah Lawrence campus he borrows a pair of seniors, Jacqueline and Jemima, and sets them to walking in the vicinity of the azalea bush and the handsome, chaste thief. Jacqueline and Jemima have just failed the Graduate Record Examination and are cursing God in colorful Sarah Lawrence language. What happens next?
Of course, I don't know.
It's appropriate to pause and say that the writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do. I cannot tell you, at this moment, whether Jacqueline and Jemima will succeed to jimmy the chastity belt's lock, or whether the thief, whose name is Zeno and who has stolen the answer sheets for the next set of Graduate Record Examinations, will pocket the pocket watch or turn it over to the nearest park employee. The fate of the azalea bush, whether it will bloom or strangle in a killing frost, is unknown to me.
A very conscientious writer might purchase an azalea at the Downtown Nursery and a gold watch at Tiffany's, hire a handsome thief fresh from Riker's Island, obtain the loan of a chastity belt from the Metropolitan, inveigle Jacqueline and Jemima in from Bronxville, and arrange them all under glass for study, writing up the results in honest, even fastidious prose. But in so doing he places himself in the realm of journalism or sociology. The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.
This is not to say that I don't know anything about Jacqueline or Jemima, but what I do know comes into being at the instant it's inscribed.
...read the rest of Berio's program note here
Previewing our upcoming Garden & BUILDINGS CAMPAIGN
Sign up for project and campaign updates
During the first week of March, every town in Vermont gathers for its annual Town Meeting to vote on town leaders and finances, and to learn more about vital programs. (Even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had to attend Town Meeting in Cavendish, Vermont to propose a chain link fence for his property.) This year's presentation in Putney included a preview of Yellow Barn’s evolving plans for the Big Barn property on Main Street.
With our priorities, project collaborators, and timeline in place, Yellow Barn is preparing to launch an 18-month campaign later this spring. In December, we received a lead gift to create a percussion studio and play garden next to the Putney Public Library, and to purchase much-needed percussion instruments. The percussion studio, complete with its new family of instruments, will open this summer.
Next we are focusing on safety, accessibility, and mobility throughout the property, starting this summer with improved accessible parking options, and continuing this fall with graded, well-lit pathways, plus—after this particular winter—snow guards on our roofs. Plantings will follow, and the culminating event will be the addition of retractable glass walls to the pavilion where we serve ice cream during concert intermissions, making it a solarium, open year-round for socializing, meetings, pop-ups, and other events.
We are thrilled to announce that we are partnering with the Vermont Community Foundation to launch much-need reserve and endowments funds, each vitally important for Yellow Barn’s future. Itself a non-profit organization, VCF pools investments like ours to strengthen our state as a whole. 10% of our upcoming campaign will be directed to our reserve and endowment funds.
Click on project timeline to view larger:
Click on the pavilion to view larger:
Click on images to view priorities, projects, and collaborators:
Video Excerpts from our January Artist Residency concert
This fall and winter Yellow Barn hosted 11 Artist Residencies, including recording residencies, studio concerts, workshops, and work-in-process performances in the Big Barn. Thank you to all our audience members, especially those who inspired an added second performance on January 31st, the culmination of a week-long residency with Daniel Chong, Jessica Bodner, Daniel Anastasio, and Naomi Shihab Nye.
Enjoy these excerpts from the performance and post-concert discussion:
