Music Academy of the West

The Music Academy of the West is a summer classical music training program in Montecito, California, and festival with performances in the County of Santa Barbara. Overview The academy annually enrolls 136 pre-professional musicians in their late teens and early 20s, who receive merit-based full scholarships to workshops led by famous composers, conductors, and artists. Programs of study are vocal piano, voice, collaborative piano, solo piano, and instrumental. The eight-week summer music festival consists of concerts and operas, as well as public master classes with famous musicians. History The first impulse to establish a summer music festival in the Santa Barbara County came from soprano Lotte Lehmann in 1940. In 1947 the Music Academy of the West was founded by Southern California arts patrons, musicians, conductors and composers. In addition to Lotte Lehmann, founders of the academy were conductor Otto Klemperer, violinist Roman Totenberg, harpsichordist Rosalyn Tureck, baritone John Charles Thomas and composers Ernest Bloch, Darius Milhaud, Roy Harris and Arnold Schoenberg, who served as the academy's first composer in residence. Among the first scholarship funders were singer-actors Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, violinist Jascha Heifetz and movie producer Darryl F. Zanuck. The academy first hosted its summer sessions at Cate School in Carpinteria, before starting to relocate to a 10 acre (c. 4 hectare) property in Montecito in 1951. The former Montecito Country Club, regarded a showcase garden of Montecito and named Miraflores ("see flowers" in Spanish,) has been the academy's campus since the summer of 1952, though students had to be housed in dorms and at sorority and fraternity houses at the University of California, Santa Barbara for several years. Since 2016 accommodations are at Westmont College.