I want to take this means to thank you for listening to the music being played during Sunday programs. Just as surely as anyone who lights a candle and speaks to the congregation, or any Sunday speaker, or the moderator, those of us who are musicians speak and need to be heard. I watch with pride as people all over the auditorium sit respectfully and listen to speakers, no matter who is articulating ideas and from where; and that same kind of courtesy is most appreciated by those of us who bring music to the Sunday programs. From the first note of a piece until and including its very last tone, any composition, played by any musician, is most definitely a message. That message contains a beginning theme, a variation on it, and a concluding passage, all of which are tied together musically and emotionally by musicians at the UFL. With sincerity and appreciation, I thank you for listening intently as we musicians offer our own individual messages. When music is performed--and genuinely heard--it then takes on life and meaning. Thank you, again!

Linda Smith

The Chautauqua Institution is a collection of about 1200 Victorian cottages, contemporary houses, condos, hotels, shops and public meeting halls, covering 225 acres along the shore of Chautauqua Lake in the westernmost part of New York state. During the winter there are about 400 people there, but for nine weeks in the summer the population swells to nearly 8,000 at any given time.

Once visitors have entered the Grounds, they are free to attend most of the programs, which take place either in the 5000 seat, roofed open-air Amphitheater or in one of the open pavilions dotted among the groves and cottages. Car access is strictly limited during the Season, so for the summer period Chautauqua becomes a community on foot.

Chautauqua draws on the deep American tradition of the town as a planned community that should improve the spiritual and mental life of its inhabitants as well as house them. Chautauqua, founded with the specific purpose of adult education, has been a beacon of American culture and values for well over a century.

"Chautuaqua is part of the American imagination," said Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, giving a Chautuaqua lecture in 1993. "It belongs with Concord, Massachusetts, or Hannibal, Missouri, or Springfield, Illinois, as one of these places that helps define who we are and what we believe in. It has its own mythic force."

Nine American presidents have spent time at Chautauqua; George Gershwin wrote his Concerto in F there; Amelia Earhart landed her plane on the community’s golf course; FDR made his "I Hate War" speech there; and President Clinton practiced for the debates of his 1996 presidential campaign there. "Now the doctrine which Chautauqua teaches is this," wrote founder, Dr. John Vincent, in 1885: "that every man has a right to be all that he can be."

This was our third time to go for a week to hear lectures by Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong, Huston Smith, Mel Levine, and other writers, poets, and educators. In addition, each week included concerts by symphony orchestras, chamber music, plays [Chekhov’s "The Cherry Orchard,"], ballet, opera [The Marriage of Figaro], so that each day would be filled from 9:00 am to 10:00 pm. And there was much more ... being able to clone myself would have helped!