MISSION: PLAYING FOR PEACE

The mission of the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music is Playing for Peace. Through the creation of intensely expressive music in Apple Hill Chamber Players concerts, workshops, and festivals we seek to inspire and promote friendship, community, peace, and understanding between and among peoples of diverse backgrounds and conflicting cultures -at Apple Hill, throughout the United States, and throughout the world.

PHILOSOPHY/BACKGROUND

For over thirty years, our mission of Playing for Peace has inspired us to honor the special voice in all people, regardless of age, background, culture, or ability. Playing for Peace has focused our belief in our music's capacity to enhance human impulses of brotherhood and sisterhood, transcending the national, cultural, and political boundaries, which divide us. We are persuaded that our music has the unique power to amplify inherent characteristics which define our humanity: strength, commitment, empathy, persistence, responsibility, and relaxed awareness.

Since 1988, the Apple Hill Chamber Players have expanded their touring to include not only to all corners of the United States, but also Playing for Peace tours to the Middle East, Europe, and other parts of the world. Nationally and internationally the Apple Hill Chamber Players perform concerts, conduct master classes and workshops, and award Playing for Peace scholarships to bring international and American musicians of diverse backgrounds and conflicting cultures together to form special communities at the annual Apple Hill Music School and Festival at our home base in East Sullivan, NH, USA.

Within the USA, the Playing for Peace mission encircles participants and audience members of all backgrounds, ages, experience levels, and abilities, with an emphasis on reaching out to inner city minorities.

The May 1992 Apple Hill Chamber Players tour of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and the subsequent August 1992 experiences of eleven Israeli and Arab scholarship students at Apple Hill, were documented in the namesake PBS broadcast and video "Playing for Peace", by the Emmy award winning Peter Rosen, seen by more than four million viewers.

At the Apple Hill Chamber Music School and Festival, a thirty-one year tradition, challenge and safety coexist to encourage musical and personal risk-taking and growth. Each summer in the rustic country setting of our two-hundred year old New England farm, we create an exuberant and retreat-like atmosphere which combines ordinarily disparate elements: non-competitiveness, the pursuit of personal and musical excellence, high individual motivation, patience, rapid bursts of learning and improvement, fun, energetic physical activity, love and acceptance of music for its own sake, vigorous encouragement of people of all backgrounds and abilities-from professional musicians to skilled and enthusiastic music students of all ages.

In Apple Hill Chamber Players worldwide concerts, residencies, master classes, workshops, and recordings, Apple Hill presents music which is internationally acclaimed for its vitality, vibrancy, charisma, eloquence, warmth, accessibility, and intimacy.

We cordially invite all who love to play or listen, to share our vision of the reconciling role of Playing for Peace and join us in our pursuits.