★ Aspen Music Festival and School

01Why it matters

Aspen is a cultural town because of this festival, not the other way around. It began in 1949 as part of Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke's Goethe bicentennial gathering, the same event that produced the Aspen Institute, and the two institutions have shared the valley since. In our reading the festival's real distinction is the teaching. Very few summer festivals put a conservatory at the centre rather than at the edge, and the effect on the programming is audible: the orchestras are young, the repertoire is broader than a visiting-orchestra season would allow, and the alumni list - Joshua Bell, Yuja Wang, Marin Alsop, Renee Fleming among them - is a fair measure of what eight weeks in a mountain town can do to a career.

02The week around it

Aspen's summer is busier than most visitors expect and the music festival runs underneath all of it. The Food and Wine Classic takes the town in mid-June and the Aspen Ideas Festival follows at the end of the month, both before the music season is fully under way; from July the town settles into a longer rhythm of hiking, cycling, the Saturday market, the Aspen Art Museum and Anderson Ranch up the valley at Snowmass. Independence Pass is open, the Maroon Bells shuttle runs, and the afternoon thunderstorm is a fixed feature of the day. The festival's own presence in the town is constant rather than concentrated: students practising in doorways, free master classes, chamber concerts in the afternoon and an orchestral programme in the evening under the tent. Because the season is eight weeks long, no single weekend defines it, and a visitor can arrive at almost any point in July or August and find a full week of music.

03When to arrive

Any Thursday to Monday in July or August works. The orchestral concerts cluster at weekends and the chamber and recital programme fills the weekdays, so a long weekend gives a fair cross-section. Master classes are worth planning a morning around. If the trip is meant to take in the Food and Wine Classic or Ideas Festival as well, that means June, when the music season is only starting.

04Where to stay

Downtown Aspen, within the core grid, puts the Wheeler Opera House on your street and the Music Tent and Harris Hall a ten-minute walk away; it is also the most expensive lodging in Colorado. The West End, between downtown and the tent, is residential and quiet and where much of the festival's own accommodation sits. Snowmass Village, twenty minutes down valley, is the family alternative with more supply and lower rates. Basalt and Carbondale, thirty to fifty minutes down the Roaring Fork, are what most summer visitors actually use, connected by the free valley bus.

05Access and hospitality

Tickets are sold event by event through the festival's online calendar and box office, with Season Pass and Locals Pass options. The festival publishes a Free Fridays - Under 35 programme and 10-dollar child tickets for most regular events for ages four to eighteen, bought through box office staff rather than online. It states plainly that it does not discount for veterans, military, seniors or students over eighteen. The box office is reachable on 970-925-9042. Prices for individual events are published with the season calendar and are not reproduced here.

06Where the social activity happens

The lawn and paths around the Music Tent before evening concerts; the West End streets on the walk down; the restaurants and bars along Hyman and Hopkins Avenues, and the Hotel Jerome's bar, which is the town's constant. During the day, the Saturday farmers' market on Hopkins, the Aspen Art Museum and the trails up Smuggler and toward the Maroon Bells. Aspen's summer social life is more relaxed and considerably more local than its winter one, and the festival audience blends into it rather than standing apart.

07Getting there

08Practicalities

09History

In 1949 Walter Paepcke, a Chicago industrialist who had bought into a near-abandoned silver-mining town, staged the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation in Aspen with a tent designed by Eero Saarinen. The convocation produced three institutions: the Aspen Institute, the Aspen Skiing Company's cultural ambitions and the music festival. The music school followed almost immediately, and the tent - rebuilt several times, most recently as the Michael Klein Music Tent in 2000 - has remained the festival's centre. Harris Concert Hall was added in 1993 and the Bucksbaum Campus in 2016, giving the school a permanent home. The festival's model of pairing student orchestras with visiting professionals has been copied widely and changed little here.

10Who is there

Aspen's summer residents and second-home owners, many of whom subscribe; the students' families; classical audiences from Denver and the Front Range and from across the United States who build a week around the season; conservatory faculty and alumni; and general summer visitors who take a concert or two. Broader in age and less formal than the equivalent European festivals.