Swallowtail MusicFest

We want to bring music to the mountains.

Hi everyone! Alice here. I want to share a story with you on how I fell in love with music - so far in love that I decided I wanted to dedicate my life to performing, sharing, producing, composing, and being immersed in music. It was the summer of 2003, and I had just started violin lessons a year before. My violin teacher decided to go see his students who were performing at Sewanee Summer Music Festival, and he thought it would be fun to bring me along. When we arrived, we were surrounded by musicians of all ages: students my age wearing black and with instruments on their backs, heading to the concert hall for the evening’s concerts. Faculty members laughing with each other as if they’ve known each other for decades - which they did. I spotted the conductor getting out of his car, toting heavy scores under his arm. Never before had I been in an environment where music was so alive in every person there. The audience, including myself, was mesmerized by the performance, and I knew I had to be a part of this world.

Fast forward 19 years, and I have since gone to over 20 music festivals (Sewanee SMF was one of them!) and my dream since that day in 2003 has always been to bring the same joy that I felt to others in any way possible.

That’s where Swallowtail MusicFest begins: we want to start a festival in Blue Ridge where we can share the music we have loved and worked hard on all of our lives, the music that brought us joy, comfort, and purpose as we found ourselves as musicians. We also want to perform covers of your favorite songs, bring internationally renowned musicians to Blue Ridge, and create immersive experiences and events that will become special memories for everyone.

As most of the group are native Georgians, we’ve known the beauty of Blue Ridge for many years of our lives, and we can’t imagine a more beautiful place to create music with you and for you. Here are some of our ideas on what we would do, with your help:

The plan:

Bringing music to Blue Ridge will generate more tourism, more community-building opportunities, and more exposure for Blue Ridge business owners, AIrbnb cabin owners, artists, and venues. We’d like to propose a 7-day chamber music festival featuring Edgewood String Quartet and renowned musicians from all over the globe, performing concerts in magical settings that highlight the beauty of Blue Ridge. Concerts will be performed at various locations in Blue Ridge, featuring classical concerts, concerts with all sorts of genres (pop, rock, anime!…and more), bonfire concerts, pop-up concerts, kid’s concerts, outreach concerts, and musical immersive experiences.

However, these concerts aren’t just your average music concert where you’ll be sitting on a chair and listening quietly for most of the time. We want to create unique concert experiences for each of these concerts, whether they’re performed in a magical forest setting, partnered with artists who have designed an incredible atmosphere, paired with food, drink or a special activity, or maybe it will even require audience participation! The festival will end with a magical, musical paper lantern ceremony by the lake.

Performances would be made possible through the partnership and sponsorship of local Blue Ridge vendors as well as Airbnb Super Hosts. While Swallowtail MusicFest is planned to run for the duration of one week, we hope to expand the festival in length and size. We are hoping to have our first festival during Fall of 2023!

Partner with us!

We’ve experienced the power of creative partnerships through our journey as Edgewood String Quartet. If you love this idea and want to help us make it happen, we’d love to partner with you! Here are several examples of mutually-beneficial partnerships:

Concert venues

We are looking for places to perform! If you feel that a chamber concert would be a great for a venue you are affiliated with, we’d love to plan something with you. We love curating our programs to the spaces we’re performing in as well as the people involved in the space.

Airbnb’s and Host Families

For any properties willing to host musicians during the festival, we will create lots of promotional content that can be used for advertisment, perform special house concerts at your property, and provide a chance for you to get to know our musicians on a personal level. In exchange, you will be helping us provide our musicians a safe, beautiful space to stay during their time in Blue Ridge.

Local restaurants

We’d love to partner with you on a concert at your restaurant! We have had great success with our series “Tasting Notes”, which brings culinary art, mixology, and music together under one theme.

Local sponsorships and partnerships

We’d love to collaborate with local restaurants, breweries, wineries, bakeries, artisans, artists, and the like at Swallowtail MusicFest. We want to showcase local vendors and provide spaces and opportunities to sell and enrich their product through partnership with our music. We’d also love to partner with anyone creatively to create immersive experiences: for example, one of the things we’d love to do is a musical yoga session! Anyone interested?

Sponsors

Our festival will be run by Edgewood Arts Collective 501(c)3. As we complete the process for non-profit status, we would love to be in touch with anyone who might be interested in becoming a sponsor for Swallowtail MusicFest, becoming a patron of the arts and bringing music to Blue Ridge in a beautiful new way.

Where funds go:

Any funding and sponsorships received will go towards making each concert a reality, room and board costs for the musicians, travel costs, advertising, printing, chair rentals, and designing unique, immersive experiences that don’t yet exist in the world!

Help us from the start:

If you would like to contribute to the cause right away, please feel free to send a donation using the button below. We are so thankful for your generosity and for all of your help in making this dream a reality for everyone!