BRUNSWICK, Maine — The Bowdoin International Music Festival is a celebration of classical music that draws about 250 young musicians from every state and from countries around the world. It's This summer, it's celebrating a major anniversary.
It’s been around for 60 years.
Will Fedkenheuer has seen a lot of them. Now a violin instructor and violinist with the Miro Quartey, Fedkenheuer first attended the festival as a student in 1991.
“[That] was a pivotal summer for me,” he recalled, in part because it broadened his outlook. “It was this amalgamation of ideas and personalities and culture where we were looking at the same things but very differently.”
The festival, which runs for about six weeks in July and early August on the Bowdoin College campus, also exposes students to musicians whose talents far exceed their own. Students practice, receive instruction, practice some more, and eventually perform.
“I remember listening to a few violinists. I had never heard somebody my age play that way—ever,” Fedkenheuer says. “All of us would be sitting there with our mouths open.”
Did that experience make him want to get better? “Absolutely,” he said.
Andrea Sarahi, a classical composer from Mexico City, is attending the festival for the first time this year.
Sarahi is one of the students who’s excited by the gifted teachers and the young talent she sees around her. Her focus is on hard work and disciplined habits, not on the expectation that sooner or later she’ll be touched by a muse.
“You cannot wait for inspiration, because if you keep waiting, it will never come. You have to sit down and work," she said.