Ask Wednesday: Maria Napolitano Fish on the Killington Music Festival

View of Killington Peak with the
Festival's performance place
(Ramshead Lodge) in the foreground

It's the outreach

By Morris Dean

Maria Napolitano Fish is the executive director of the Killington Music Festival. My wife and I occasionally have the pleasure of speaking with her when we go up to Vermont of a summer to attend concerts and visit our son, who has been the Festival's dean of students for a number of summers. Knowing how important the Festival is not only to the students who participate but also to the community that comes out to enjoy its concerts or is the beneficiary of student outreach, we decided to see whether we could interview the Festival's executive director. [Our questions are in italics.]

Vacation's destination

Our son arrives later today, following his twelfth consecutive summer at the Killington Music Festival. Visiting him in Killington was the reason we went to Vermont two weeks ago, and the reason we have gone eight or so times in the years of his summer residency there.
    The summer that his wife and son came to Vermont with him (2002), we had lunch with her and our grandson at Bentley's Restaurant in Woodstock, a beautiful town of about three thousand east of Killington on U.S. Route 4. That might have been the first time we really visited Woodstock.

Front yard of the Woodstock Inn

This year, as you may know from my posts earlier this week about our sojourn among the baleines, the bohemians, and the botanics, we also went to Quebec.
    I had a comfortable feeling, when we arrived back in Woodstock on Sunday the 22nd, that we had come back home, and I would be sad to leave on Thursday. I would miss Woodstock.
    We went to Bentley's on Monday, even though we'd discovered the previous evening that its menu was severely limited because of a recent fire. From where we sat for lunch, I pointed toward a table below, where the mirrors came together in the corner. "That's where we had lunch in 2002."

Le Manoir Richelieu, terrace of
Restaurant Bellerive

During our few days in Woodstock I realized that, now, not only was I going to miss Woodstock, but I was also going to miss La Malbaie, just as we were both of us already missing home.
    In fact, after we collected Siegfried at the kennel the following Thursday afternoon and entered our house with him, my wife exclaimed, "It is so good to be home!"

Going on vacation seems to be a way of acquiring more places that, if you're lucky, will feel like home to you. And maybe no one would ever go on vacation if they thought they wouldn't be able to return to home soon.

Featured on the cover of Time

Another treat, in that cardboard box on Saturday, was a mock issue of Time Magazine, dated May 30, 1995, that my son had created, probably in elementary school around 1978 or 1979. The cover article featured a "Masterpiece~Music~Writer," illustrated with a mustachioed musician holding a book titled How to Compose a Masterpiece.
    This prophetic piece reminds me of the class prophecy I'd written for my graduation from Liberty School. My piece had identified what various classmates would be doing some years later; my son's much more imaginatively (and accurately) says what he himself would be doing during the following seventeen years or so:

Now a composer and classical musician, Geoff Dean started out as a cellist in the fourth grade. He continued to play the cello throughout elementary school.
    In high school, he became an excellent classical musician and played in the school orchestra. While in college at Yale University [alas, no, he wouldn't even apply to Yale, but would attend the North Carolina School of the Arts], he studied music composition, plant taxonomy [his mother's particular interest], and chemistry. In his spare time, he took piano lessons.
    After graduating from college, Geoff wrote a short piece called, "Moonlit Music," for violin, clarinet, cello, bassoon, French horn, and viola. It was to be in C minor. It happened to catch the attention of a conductor whose manager wanted to buy a short piece of music to play during intermissions at an opera house in New York City.
    The conductor told the manager, who offered 3,000 dollars for it. Geoff accepted the offer, on the condition that he get 5.00 dollars for every two times it was played. The piece was played during all of the intermissions of 50 plays, and was heard by millions. Soon it was being played all over America and Europe. Geoff was becoming known everywhere, and making a fortune.
    In 1990, he wrote a short symphony. It was heard by more people than ever before when it was played in concert tour with a collection of selected musical pieces.
    Geoff has decided that he has overstayed his welcome in the musical world. Other composers aren't very friendly with him; they make fun of his age and the bow ties he wears. Now he is going to write music to play on his piano and cello at his home in Los Gatos, California. Besides playing his instruments, he also likes to work on his tree and flower gardens. He thinks that he's got a prize peach tree growing in his back yard! –Herman Grablow

I said that Geoff's childhood prophecy was more accurate than mine. He did continue, and continues to this day, to play the cello. He is a professional musician. He has composed a few pieces. He has transcribed many pieces (mostly Bulgarian compositions) for performance on the violoncello.
    He performs all over Europe and is about to leave for a week of performances in Japan, traveling there with the conductor of the Sophia Philharmonic Orchestra and its concertmistress.
    He is a member of the Sofia Quartet and a founding member of the Ardenza Trio. He organizes the annual Am-Bul Festival of American and Bulgarian Music. He is the author of a blog of "random notes from the daily life of an American musician in Bulgaria."
    He has a profile on the website at the American University in Bulgaria. He is listed as the dean of students on the website of Killington Music Festival.
    He hasn't made a fortune yet, however.

On the Appalachian Trail

A week ago today, my wife and I walked a ways on the Appalachian Trail in Vermont, and I have photographs to prove it.
    I'll admit that we only realized two days ago what "AT" on the sign meant, however embarrassing that might be to anyone else but me to have to admit. Another sign said, in effect, "Go this way to head towards Georgia" (i.e., it said "AT SOUTH").
    Which meant, apparently, that the handicapped-accessible boardwalk we'd taken to get to Thundering Falls the previous day (Saturday),

My youthful trekking companion cavorting for the camera

was part of the Appalachian Trail, too—probably the easiest section of the whole however many hundreds of miles of its length.
    [According to Wikipedia, it's 2,181 miles long, from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, or vice versa. But my wife read somewhere this morning that you shouldn't start in Maine, because the trail is so rough there (and in New Hampshire) that even experienced hikers need to be extra careful. Maybe that's why Wikipedia says from Georgia to Maine. But at least one blind man has walked the whole trail (with his guide dog). I read his book a dozen or so years ago and recommend it: Blind Courage, by Bill Irwin (with David McCasland), 1992.]
    [August 2. My friend Ralph commented that "the reason people start the Appalachian trail in Georgia is that it's a 6-month, March-to-September trek, and you wouldn't want to hike it in Maine in March or in North Carolina in August."]
    The boardwalk was just up River Road from the Killington city building and the Sherburne Public Library (Killington was originally named Sherburne).

Photographic opportunities along the boardwalk:

Bog at beginning of boardwalk to Thundering Falls
(left)

(middle)

(right)

Cranberries, we thought

[August 2. Ralph also said, "About the berries, I'm not sure what they are, but Vermont is not what you would call a cranberry state, having none of the lowland sandy bogs of Massachusetts or Rhode Island."]

Flowers

More flowers

And more flowers

Shadow portrait of my hiking companion

Just a few more feet to Thundering Falls

Literally To Thundering Falls

Dark blue berries just before Thundering Falls

Thundering Falls!

Flowers along the boardwalk back from Thundering Falls

More cranberries

[August 2. Keep in mind Ralph's doubt that they're cranberries.]

Baby crab apples, we thought

Anyway, the next day (Sunday) we took a road above the falls. According to the map, there was a trail down to it. Immediately off the road, a creek sped down the hill toward the falls.

Hand-held (no tripod) for about 1/8 of a second
(as well as I can remember)

    I was preceded down the trail:

Definitely no boardwalk

After we viewed the falls again, I walked back up the Appalachian Trail to the car while my companion walked down it, along the boardwalk, to River Road.

KMF in 28th summer of music education

My son recently introduced a short video program about the Killington Music Festival, featured by the Rutland Herald on its website. The 3-minute program includes some great string music.

The Six Mountains

We're back today from four days in Vermont, where we visited our son at the Killington Music Festival and identified the "Six Mountains" referred to in the name of the inn we stayed in. (If you click on the photo, you should be able to make out their names in the enlargement of the ski trail billboard behind the Ramshead performance place.)

Yesterday we took a gondola up to Killington Peak. Looking westward toward Rutland: