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If it weren’t for agriculture, northeast Indiana would not have the MasterWorks Festival.
Dr. Patrick Kavanaugh established the festival in 1997 at Houghton College, a picturesque, private Christian college in Houghton, N.Y.
Even though Houghton is only about 70 miles from Buffalo, it is in the midst of some of the richest and least populated farmland in Allegheny County.
In other words, there weren’t a lot of people around in the summer to attend the MasterWorks Festival’s concerts.
“We loved it there,” Kavanaugh says, “but we weren’t getting large enough audiences in the middle of nowhere. I mean, how many farmers were going to come out and see a show? There were more people onstage than out in the seats,” he says. “And that was disheartening.”
So Kavanaugh moved the festival lock, stock, hymns and carols to Grace College at Winona Lake in 2002.
And the concerts have been sold out ever since.
Or they would have been sold out if they weren’t free.
The MasterWorks Festival is a unique concept that appears to have succeeded beyond Kavanaugh’s wildest expectations.
Kavanaugh wanted to offer high school- and college-age students serious summer instruction in classical music, dance, voice and theater with the additional assurance that those classes would be rooted in Christian principles.
This weekend, 250 students from across the globe will arrive at Grace College to begin four weeks of intensive courses, concerts and recitals.
The ratio of students to teachers is roughly 3-to-1, Kavanaugh says.
Most of the students pay some tuition, but the concerts they perform are always free and open to the public.
“Whole families can come out,” Kavanaugh says. “I love to look out and see big families. To bring your family to see a modern orchestra these days, you have to take out a second mortgage on your house.”
There are more than 40 free performances during the festival, including two weekly orchestral performances, a dance recital with orchestra, a theater production, piano recitals, chamber music recitals, faculty recitals, guest artist performances and a concerto competition.
The MasterWorks Festival opens today with a faculty recital at Rodeheaver Auditorium.
Kavanaugh says the MasterWorks Festival has always strived to be “a safe place to spend the summer,” whether one is talking about physical, emotional or spiritual safety.
“Whoever heard of a competition where they pray for each kid before they compete?” he says.
But Kavanaugh says some people over the years have confused, purposefully or accidentally, spiritual safety with artistic laxity.
“The typical person out there sees ‘Christian this’ or ‘Christian that’ and thinks ‘Well, that must be a crummy thing.’ We still have to fight this.
“We want to be loving and encouraging, but we don’t want (students) in gaga land,” he says. “We want them to know how tough it is out there. We literally cram six months of collegiate training into four weeks. We get ’em up early and send ’em to bed tired. There are no days off, and there’s no time off.”
The standards for admission get higher and higher every year, Kavanaugh says.
“We tell (current) students, ‘We’d love to have you come back next year, but you have to show us you’ve grown.’
“Over the years, we have had some parents say, ‘How dare you turn down my little Sally. I thought you were Christian.’ But if we’d let her in, she’d be miserable when she found out she couldn’t keep up with everyone.”
Kavanaugh says 85 percent of the students receive some tuition assistance. And he says some international students on full scholarships get off the plane with nothing.
“They literally show up without a dime in their pockets,” he says. “They came up with the money to get here and now they’re broke.”
Broke, but crazily talented.
“Some of these kids are scary, they’re so stinking good,” Kavanaugh says. “They have more talent than the law allows.”
