♪♫ Pastorale Travel Bug ♫♪

Pastorale Travel Bug would like to have a musical journey around the world!  Please help Pastorale visit anyplace that might be musically significant, and explain why in your comments.  Thank you for your help!

Here are some places that are particularly meaningful or interesting to me:

• Ravinia, Highland Park, Illinois - Ravinia Festival is the oldest outdoor music festival in the United States, and is the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Maybe this TB will get to visit here before I do!  (http://www.ravinia.org/)
• Quartz Mountain Arts and Conference Center, Lone Wolf, Oklahoma - The site of the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, where I spent many joyful summers immersed in great music.  (http://www.oaiquartz.org/aboutus/)
• New Orleans, Louisiana - the birth place of Jazz, as well as where my then-future husband threw me in a swimming pool on a high school orchestra trip.
• Austin, Texas - home of SXSW, Austin City Limits, and where I had the amazing experience of performing with Itzhak Perlman.
• Music Vale Seminary, Salem, Connecticut - The site of the first music conservatory in the United States, now a wildlife preserve.  (http://connecticuthistory.org/music-vale-seminary-in-salem-credited-as-being-first-in-us/)
• The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire - The more than 6800 artists who have benefited from a residency at MacDowell include two of my favorite composers, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. A registered National Historic Landmark, The MacDowell Colony was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1997.  (http://www.macdowellcolony.org/about-History.html)
• Tanglewood, Lenox and Stockbridge, MA - home of the annual summer Tanglewood Music Festival and the Tanglewood Jazz Festival, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home.
• The American Conservatory, Fontainebleau, France - Centered in the Palais de Fontainebleau, less than an hour southeast of Paris, the American Conservatory was founded in 1921 to introduce the best American music students to the French musical tradition of teaching, composing and performing.  It has included on its faculty some of my favorite composers, including Maurice Ravel and Leonard Bernstein.  Nadia Boulanger was the Director from 1949 to 1979.  The American Conservatory has played a major role in the training of many famous American musicians including Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson.  (http://www.fontainebleauschools.org/music/)
• The Appian Way connects Rome to Brindisi, Apulia, in southeast Italy. It was one of the earliest and strategically most important Roman roads and was the subject of the fourth movement of the symphonic poem The Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi.  The Pines of the Appian Way (Tempo di Marcia): "In the misty dawn on the Appian Way, solitary pines guard the tragic country. Indistinctly, incessantly, we hear the rhythm of innumerable steps. The poet imagines a vision of ancient glory; at the sound of trumpets in the brilliance of the sunrise, a consular army bursts forth towards the sacred Way, triumphantly climbing to the Capitol." - Program notes provided by Respighi in the score. (http://youtu.be/F0StojlnlEU)  This is one of my very favorite pieces and never fails to give me goosebumps!

Pastorale began as an ornament on our Christmas tree, and is now enjoying a second life as a travel bug!