 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Phil
Date: 2001-11-27 15:36
Has anyone attended or sent their children to BLue Lake Fine Arts Camp.
If so, how was the experinece.
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2001-11-28 06:21
2 kids have attended, one toured Europe a few years back, one touring next year. Write to me off-line.
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Author: James Garcia
Date: 2001-11-28 17:16
I went to blue after my freshman year. I had a nice time socially, i made some good friends but there was definatly not enough musical education. As for as learning music i can't say i came out with anything except a 3200 clarinet that was cracked because i was FORCED to play on it outside when it was 60 or less degrees and I was never compensated for it. That year that i went 5 other clarinets and a bass clarinet cracked because of this. So personally i would never recomend this camp for a person who is a serious musician becasue its always outside and because of the lack of learning but if someone decided to go, i would say bring a plastic clarinet for the mornings. I would say some other good camps to look at are Illinois Summer Youth Music, university of IL , tanglewood (boston U) bevard, and indiana U oh and of course interlochen!!
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2001-11-28 19:32
At Tanglewood (BU) you will be playing outside, too.
What soprano clarinet costs $3200? There are a few, but not many HS students would have one ... and as to compensating you for a cracked clarinet - that's never going to happen at any place you go. They don't hide the fact that you're going to be outside, and you don't play in the rain.
Sheesh ... what did you expect?
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2001-11-28 19:33
BTW - summers at Interlochen are on the average considerably cooler than those at Blue Lake. There's still spots of snow in the woods in May.
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Author: liz
Date: 2001-11-28 20:23
i went to blue lake last summer, and i agree completely with james. we had tech classes in the morning when it was maybe 40 degrees, and they expected us to play outside. i know that they make it known that you play outside, but they know that many of the kids there have nice wooden clarinets that can be damaged...they could have had those classes in the afternoon. everybody in my tech class had wooden clarinets, and i think 4 of the 5 of us had r-13's. one of the girls had been there the year before and had gotten a crack in hers, so she had her plastic one for the mornings and her wooden one there for the afternoons. anyways, it was very nice socially. i made a lot of very good friends there-everybody in my cabin got along, although i know many girls who were not so lucky. i think it depends on how serious you are about music when deciding to go there. i was really dissapointed at the lack of learning. i really didn't get anything out of it at all...the main focus in the tech class was to learn major scales up to four sharp and four flats. if that's not sad, i don't know what is. especially since this was the tech class for the players in the highest band at the camp. i got to play in a group that was decent, but it wasn't much better than my school group. this is a better camp to go to if you're not that serious about music because it struck me as more of a social camp.
oh, and we did have to play in the rain. they used to have a sunday concert in the middle of the session, but last year they changed it to a tuesday "concert" where each wind group played a song or two of what they were working on for the other groups. it was pouring rain, and they still made us play in the shell. it's covered, but the rain was coming in on the sides, and of course the people with wooden instruments were protesting. then our cases all got soaked, so there's another show of poor planning on their part.
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Author: Ralph Katz
Date: 2001-11-29 16:54
I went to BLFAC their first year - 1964. It was definitely low budget then, but a great experience. Played a lot of band literature I wouldn't have otherwise. Went on a scholarship (don't think they still had these) which involved raking cactus out of the football field (western michigan micro-climate - really!) They didn't have an anvil for one of the Holst suites - so the band director took a couple of percussion players to a local junk yard with their mallets to get a suitable hunk of metal.
Fast forward - my wife taught junior high band there 1992-1996. It was lots bigger but still appeared to be a good experience for the kids. The food was a minus, essentially similar to the low-budget grub at Interlochen. The size made things seem a lot more impersonal to me, but the two places occupy the same order of magnitude. But, what do I know - I was just an adult camp brat who mostly hung out drinking sodas and watching my kids at the pool. I sat in with the faculty band at the session carnival and had a great time reading circus marches at break-neck speed with some better players than I was used to.
Transportation to camp is an issue - BLFAC is about 1/2 hour north of Muskegon. Don't know how they handle it now. In 1964, my folks dropped me off, and my counselor got me onto the bus back home.
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