Yellow Barn is an international center in service to music, to musicians, and to community.
Yellow Barn’s approach to lifelong education for musicians and audiences, commitment to quality and a unique philosophy, and programs that focus listeners in new ways, set it apart from any other chamber music center in this country.
Founded in 1969 in Putney, Vermont, Yellow Barn speaks to possibility, shared creative discovery, and joy in an intimate, egalitarian environment, one that promotes artistic growth regardless of experience. Through its year-round programs, Yellow Barn is a place where generations find commonality through freedom of interchange and mentorship, and where private musical discovery becomes public celebration.
Above all, Yellow Barn is a work in progress, a work that risks everything to better understand our humanhood through musical interaction.
Yellow Barn draws professional musicians from the United States, Europe, Middle East, and Asia. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Seth Knopp, participants in Yellow Barn’s summer festival explore music spanning a wide range of eras and genres alongside faculty members who are among the most highly regarded performers and pedagogues of our time. One of those faculty members spoke for the entire community when he said, “Yellow Barn is an artistic center of gravity for me.”
In addition, Yellow Barn has created and established:
- The Artist Residencies, which is the first retreat program in the country for performing musicians;
- The Young Artists Program for performers and composers ages 13-20, known for the collaborative creation and performance of 12 new works each session;
- Collaborations with “Yellow Barns” in other fields, ranging from a curriculum-based partnership with the Greenwood School in Putney, for boys ages 12-18 with diagnosed learning differences, to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas.
Yellow Barn Music Haul is the broadest interpretation of Yellow Barn’s mission. The first self-contained traveling stage of its kind, it redefines what a concert hall can be. It brings music to grammar schools and conservatories, urban neighborhoods and arts districts, city lots and open fields. It plays for people regardless of their experience with or knowledge of music, their attention captured in the unexpected moment. With Yellow Barn Music Haul we realize music’s fundamental purpose, and inherent ability, to communicate in ways that defy definition and move us without explanation.
In 1969, cellist David Wells and pianist Janet Wells founded Yellow Barn as an informal summer retreat for David's students at the Manhattan School of Music. The Wellses' neighbors embraced this vibrant addition to their community, which was named by a participant for the color of the Wellses' farm house, cooking meals for the musicians and organizing concerts for the town. Over the ensuing decades Yellow Barn has evolved into one of the finest chamber music training and performance centers in the world.
Photo: Summer festival performance in The Big Barn