By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor
The third in a series of articles prompted by the National Park Service’s centennial celebration of its founding in 1916. One of the NPS’s birthday initiatives is Find Your Park, a multi-pronged program that invites people to discover the National Park in their backyard. Throughout 2015, the Sun will offer stories about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and some of the people in our community who have developed a relationship with it.
The Sleeping Bear Dunes are alive in many ways — in folklore and legend, in plant and animal life, and, beginning in the late 1990s, with music. The first of many mid-July concerts staged at the Dune Climb took place on July 19, 1998. The idea was spawned by Crispin Campbell, cellist and Interlochen Arts Academy instructor since 1980.
At the time, Campbell was the founder and artistic director of the Manitou Music Festival (MMF), a summer project of the Glen Arbor Art Association (GAAA). The MMF concerts until then offered programs of mostly classical selections performed in Glen Arbor and Leland. The festival offered approximately six summer concerts; the music was performed by small groups of chamber musicians. Chamber music, by design and definition, is best heard in a contained space, such as your standard-issue palace chamber where so much of this music was originally played. Although the festival interjected its chamber repertoire with occasional selections from the worlds of jazz and folk, the MMF established itself as a program of classical music played in small spaces — until Campbell started thinking out of the chamber.
“The Dune Climb concerts were started mainly because I always thought it would be a great venue for a concert,” Campbell said. “I thought it would be great to offer that concert as a gift to the community.”
And to his everlasting surprise, so did the National Park Service (NPS).
“I was afraid we were going to have horrible red tape to go through, but we had a few meetings with the Park Service and they were so easy to work with,” Campbell said. “Ivan Miller (the then-superintendent of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore) thought it would be a great idea, but no one had ever come forward.”
The first program featured the Traverse Symphony Orchestra under the baton of David Holland, viola instructor at Interlochen. The orchestra played Handel’s “Water Music, and more,” which is to say a new composition by Interlochen composer Joe DeFazio. Song of the Lakes, a local quartet who, for the last three decades, have performed “Great Lakes world music,” was the guest artist that night.
“We did have some electronic amplification, but not much,” Holland said. “For some reason the sound carried. The dunes became a natural acoustical shell.”
Although she wasn’t there at the creation, Peg McCarty remembers an early Dune Climb Concert.
“I remember thinking what a cool town this was to put on this concert, and who are the people who are putting this on?” McCarty said of her inaugural Dune Climb Concert. Turns out, she ended up being one of them. She moved to Glen Arbor with her family in 1995 and became GAAA director in 2004, which puts her up to her eyeballs in Dune Climb facts and figures.
According to McCarty, the concert today costs $10,000 to stage — a dollar figure that includes hiring the musical act, shuttle buses, renting a stage and tent to cover it, sound equipment, the people who know how to operate it and a “cost recovery fee” to the local Park to cover the cost of having its staff on site and running traffic control. The GAAA pays for the concert through grants from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, the Oleson Foundation, individual and local business donations “and lots of volunteer help.” More than 25 community volunteers donate 200-plus hours of time to bring the concert to life for up to 2,500 people each year.
The Dune Climb Concert is in keeping with the spirit of the NPS’s Find Your Park program. It’s a proactive campaign to cultivate the next generation of park fans, friends, supporters and advocates in this year leading up to the 100th birthday of the Park Service’s creation. One way the NPS hopes people will find their park is through creative experiences, whether as makers, performers or enjoyers. The concept, titled “HitRecord,” is described on the NPS’s Find Your Park website: FindYourPark.com.
Its programmatic roots may have been classical, but on July 12, the 17th edition of the Dune Climb Concert throws down some new roots as it raises the funk factor with the band Hip Pocket. This 11-piece band from Grand Rapids is seasoned by more than 20 years of performing and interpreting the beat-driven music of Chicago, Tower of Power, Earth, Wind & Fire and Motown. The concert begins at 7 p.m. and is free. The fee to park in the Dune Climb lot is $10 per vehicle.
“Live music in a natural setting” is a pairing that helped make the first Dune Climb Concert a success, said David Holland. “People are really drawn to that, and have a need to experience it.” The GAAA’s Peg McCarty agrees.
“It’s a combination of the beautiful, natural setting and the music,” she said “but the fact it’s a National Park makes it feel significant” — all well and good and appreciated by the adults in the Dune Climb Concert audience. For children, however, their concert memories are made in quite another way.
“It’s a family-friendly event,” McCarty said. “The kids run up and down the dunes and no one takes offense.”
For more information about the 2015 Manitou Music Festival and Dune Climb Concert information, visit GlenArborArt.org/all-programs/manitou-music-festival/all-concerts/.