October 10-18, 2026 iN Putney, Vermont
Clockwise from left:
Yellow Barn's Beethoven Walks trail, The Big Barn, Yellow Barn's Artist Studios, The Greenwood School
Yellow Barn Chamber Music Residency for Non-Professional Musicians
For serious avocational pianists and string players
Application deadline: March 1, 2026
Yellow Barn, an international center for music in Putney, Vermont, embarks on a week-long residency for serious avocational musicians in October 2026. The work we do together will use familiar chamber music (rehearsal and coaching) settings as departure points to explore the creative impulse in composer, interpreter, and listener, and their shared potential for connection.
In addition to daily coaching sessions with Yellow Barn faculty, these connections will be amplified and deepened through group workshops with guest speakers from a variety of fields, and other activities that will provide a foundation for personal and artistic exploration and experimentation. Ultimately, in every great work of art we have all that is needed to transform both musician and listener, inviting us to better understand our humanhood through musical interaction.
—Seth Knopp, Artistic Director
Art is not an occasional refuge or a holiday, but a perpetual and inexhaustible mandate to our spirit. The efforts to fulfill this mandate belong to the most exacting, most satisfying, and therefore, to the supreme functions of man.
—Arthur Schnabel from his Music and the Line of Most Resistance
Faculty
Lynn Chang, Eric Chin, and Leonard Fu, violin
Nicholas Mann, violin and viola
Maria Lambros, viola
Natasha Brofsky, cello
Anna Han and Seth Knopp, piano
Stephen Coxe, composition
Lisa Wong, arts and health humanities
Guest Artists
Ann Glazer, artist
Ayano Kataoka, percussionist
Lukas Papenfusscline, actor and vocalist
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Yellow Barn?
Yellow Barn is located in the small rural town of Putney, Vermont. Putney is 3.5 hours from New York City, and 2.5 hours from Boston. “The best-known small town in the world,” Putney has historically been a haven for art, experiential education, farming, and touring—especially during peak foliage season!
What are the dates?
You should plan to arrive during the day on Saturday, October 10th, in time for an evening Yellow Barn concert and welcome reception for residency participants and faculty. Our work together will begin on Sunday morning, October 11th, and the residency will end with a farewell breakfast on October 18th.
What is the cost?
$2,200 per person for all program activities and meals (housing is not included in the cost)
What are the audition requirements?
Please provide two videos, one from within the past six months, and one from within the past two years. Please include two different works, or substantial movements from two different works, that make distinct technical and interpretive demands. They can be either solo or ensemble works. After videos are reviewed, some applicants will be invited for a follow-up interview over Zoom with Artistic Director Seth Knopp.
What is the audition schedule?
The deadline to apply is March 1, 2026. Results will be announced by no later than March 22, 2026.
What repertoire will I be playing?
Each musician will be a member of two ensembles, and each ensemble will explore one work. You will be asked to provide a list of the chamber music repertoire that you have already studied in depth, as well as a few examples of the kind of repertoire that you are particularly interested in playing at Yellow Barn, and that you think would help you to develop as a musician.
What is the schedule?
Our daily work together will include coaching sessions and rehearsals, instrumental classes (when instruments of a feather fly together), presentations by guest artists, and group discussions. Participants will also be able to request private lessons.
In addition, our week will include open studio visits with local artists who are part of Yellow Barn’s community, including garden designer Gordon Hayward and a tour of Hayward Gardens, and painter and printmaker Bill Kelly and exploration of the artists books published by his Brighton Press.
Where will we be rehearsing?
Most rehearsals and coaching sessions will take place in Yellow Barn’s beautiful, eco-friendly studios at the Greenwood School, our summer campus in Putney. Presentations and group discussions will be held in larger spaces at the Greenwood School, or in close proximity, including at Big Barn, our concert hall on Main Street.
Will we be performing?
At Yellow Barn, performance is regarded not as the ultimate goal, but as an essential part of a unified process of interpretation and communication, exploration and discovery. All ensembles will be performing for each other at various points during the week.
What meals are provided?
Yellow Barn is known for its food! Our outstanding chefs, who come from a variety of fantastic restaurants, will prepare three meals a day on our campus. They embrace the spirit of Yellow Barn, taking full advantage of ingredients provided by our local farms, and not only accommodate any dietary needs, but thoroughly enjoy interacting with musicians. We will provide three meals a day from October 11-17, plus breakfast on October 18th. In addition, there will be a welcome reeption on October 10th.
What accommodations are available?
There are plentiful housing options in and around Putney. Our recommendations include several five-star Airbnb’s ranging from single-bedroom options to houses with several bedrooms and bathrooms, for those who wish to share space and cost with fellow participants, or who will be joined by family members. The cost ranges from $700-$1,500 depending on the place and number of occupants. There is also a nearby hotel.
When I should arrive?
You should plan on arriving during the day on Saturday, October 10th, in time for an opening concert and welcome reception that evening. Our first full day of work together will start with breakfast on October 11th.
May I bring my partner?
Yes! Partners and family members are welcome to join in an all meals (for an additional fee), as well as the opening concert and reception, special presentations, and open studios. In October, the opportunities to experience Southern Vermont are endless, from hiking, apple picking, and foliage tours, to galleries, antique stores, and farmers markets. Putney itself is a famous home for craftwork, including painters, jewelers, potters, weavers, glassblowers, cheesemakers, wood workers, bodywork professionals, and even a winery. There are also plenty of places to enjoy maple lattes and maple creemees!
About Our Faculty & Guest Artists
Natasha Brofsky, cello, was the cellist of the Naumburg Award-winning Peabody Trio, which toured extensively throughout the US, Canada, and England. For nearly a decade, Natasha held principal positions in the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra under Iona Brown. She is a former member of the string trio Opus 3 and the Serapion Ensemble, and has performed as a guest with the Jupiter, Takács, Borromeo, Ying, and Norwegian Quartets, among others. She has recorded for CRI, New World, and Artek, and in 2018 released a recording of Beethoven’s Opus 102 cello sonatas with pianist Seth Knopp. Natasha Brofsky is on the cello faculty of The Juilliard School, and was on the cello faculty of New England Conservatory from 2004 to 2018. Yellow Barn musician (since 2001) and Yellow Barn faculty member
Eric Chin, violin, is a founding member of the acclaimed Telegraph Quartet, which is currently Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Michigan, following seven years as Quartet-in-Residence at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The Telegraph Quartet is a recipient of the Walter W. Naumburg Chamber Music Award and the Grand Prize at the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition. With the Quartet Eric has performed in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Town Hall, San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre, and at many festivals across the United Stat3es. Beyond the concert stage, the Telegraph Quartet seeks to spread its music through education and audience engagement. In the fall of 2017, the Quartet traveled to communities and schools in Maine with Yellow Barn Music Haul, a mobile performance stage that brings music outside of the concert hall to communities across the U.S., and in November 2020 launched ChamberFEAST!, a week-long chamber music intensive in Taiwan for students from Taiwanese schools and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Yellow Barn Artist Residency musician (2015, 2017)
Lynn Chang, violin, a top prizewinner of the International Paganini Competition in Genoa Italy, has enjoyed an active and versatile international career as soloist, chamber musician, and educator for over thirty years. Lynn has appeared at Marlboro, Tanglewood, Kneisel Hall, Wolf Trap, and Great Woods, and as soloist with orchestras in Boston, Miami, Salt Lake City, Oakland, Seattle, Honolulu, Beijing, Taipei, and Hong Kong. Lynn has collaborated with cellist Yo-Yo Ma on numerous occasions, and their performance of Leon Kirchner's Triptych was recorded for Sony Classical. Their world premiere performance of Ivan Tcherepin’s Double Concerto with the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra received the Grawmeyer Award for best new composition in 1995. In 2004, he participated in Ma's Silk Road Project residency at the Peabody Essex Museum. In 2011, Lynn celebrated his longtime friend Yo-Yo Ma at the Kennedy Center Honors. In 2001, Chang was honored with the first Distinguished Leadership Award from the Institute for Asian American Studies of the University of Massachusetts – Boston for his achievements as educator and musician.
Stephen Coxe, composition, is a recipient of awards from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Artspace, ASCAP, Composers Guild, Meet The Composer, and National Association of Composers, as well as a BAEF Fellowship. He has received commissions from American Voices, Musicians Accord, the Peabody Trio, Sequitur, and others, and has held residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Virginia Center. He has directed programs for young composers at the Peabody Institute, the Walden School, and the Putney School. Yellow Barn has commissioned many works from Steve, among them The Very Hungry Caterpillar for narrator, A Book of Dreamsfor accordion, percussion, and piano, and Gordon’s Garden Music, an hour-long performance and installation for multiple ensembles premiered at Hayward Gardens. Yellow Barn musician (since 1999) and Yellow Barn & Young Artists Program faculty member
Leonard Fu, violin, joined the Juilliard String Quartet and the Juilliard faculty in the fall of 2025. He has established a diverse and distinguished career as a soloist, chamber musician, concertmaster, pedagogue, and composer. He has performed across Europe, North America, and Asia, appearing in renowned venues such as the Elbphilharmonie, Béla Bartók National Concert Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Het Concertgebouw, Alice Tully Hall, and Jordan Hall. As a soloist, he has been featured with the NDR Radiophilharmonie, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, and Allentown Symphony. He has also served as guest concertmaster with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. An accomplished composer, Leonard frequently performs his own works and has been commissioned for solo and chamber pieces. Yellow Barn musician (2018, 2019, 2021)
Ann Glazer, artist, creates works that cross mediums. Her experimentation with process evokes personal narratives of everyday life. Ann received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. She was awarded fellowships from the Dallas Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (MOCA), The Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; the Reading Room, Dallas; Women & Their Work, Austin; Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary; and Barry Whistler, Conduit, AIR (NYC), DW, Kirk Hopper Fine Art and Liliana Bloch Galleries. Ann Glazer lives and works in Dallas and New York City. Yellow Barn Artist-in-Residence (2019)
Anna Han, piano, is currently studying on Kronberg Academy's Sir András Schiff Performance Programme for Young Pianists, and recently completed her Artist Diploma at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin as a student of Sir András Schiff and Schaghajegh Nostrati. She completed her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the Juilliard School under the tutelage of Robert McDonald, where she received both the prestigious Kovner Fellowship and the William Schuman Prize. A laureate of many competitions, including the Walter W. Naumburg Piano Award. Recent engagements have included performances at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance (LAMP) in Nova Scotia, Piano Salon Christophori at Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad, National Concert Hall of Taipei and at the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying). She has participated in Kneisel Hall and the Four Seasons Chamber Music Festival. Yellow Barn musician (2021, 2022, 2023) and Young Artists Program faculty member
Ayano Kataoka, percussionist, is currently a full professor at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She has been a season artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center since 2006 when she was chosen as the first percussionist for the society’s prestigious residency program, The Bowers Program (formerly Chamber Music Society Two). Together with cellist Yo-Yo Ma she gave the world premiere of Bruce Adolphe's Self Comes to Mind for cello and two percussionists, based on a text by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and featuring interactive video images of brain scans triggered by the live music performance. She presented a solo recital as part of the prestigious B to C (Bach to Contemporary) recital series at the Tokyo Opera City Recital Hall, which was broadcast nationally in Japan on NHK television. Other highlights include a performance of Steven Mackey’s Micro-Concerto for Percussion Solo and Chamber Ensemble at Alice Tully Hall, a theatrical performance of Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale at the 92nd Street Y with violinist Jaime Laredo and actors Alan Alda and Noah Wyle, and performances of Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion at the Chamber Music Society with pianists Emanuel Ax and Yoko Nozaki. Yellow Barn musician (since 2008) and Young Artists Program faculty member
Seth Knopp, piano, was a founding member of the Peabody Trio (1987-2017), recipient of the 1989 Naumburg Award. For thirty-five years Seth was a member of the piano and chamber music faculties at the Peabody Institute. In almost three decades as Artistic Director of Yellow Barn, Seth has built an international center for chamber music, bringing musicians and audiences to Putney, Vermont each summer. In 2008, he created Yellow Barn’s Artist Residencies, the first residency program for performing musicians in the United States. In 2020 Seth developed and taught Music Speaks, a course that explores how music speaks to us, and how we listen. Now in its 9th iteration, Music Speaks continues to evolve as it responds to the many interactions with its participants. Seth’s other recent projects include the creation of Beethoven Walks, transcriptions of Bach’s Musical Offering and Chaconne, the premiere recordings of Jörg Widmann’s song cycle Das Heiße Herz with baritone William Sharp and Eric Nathan's song cycle Some Favored Nook with William Sharp and soprano Tony Arnold, and performances with members of the Brentano String Quartet for the opening of the Chou Wen-Chung Center in Guangzhou, China. Yellow Barn musician and Artistic Director (since 1998)
Maria Lambros, viola, has performed as a chamber musician throughout the world as a member of three of the country’s finest string quartets in venues such as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, New York’s Lincoln Center and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. She was a member of the renowned Ridge String Quartet, which was nominated for the 1993 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance for their recording of the Dvořák Piano Quintets with pianist Rudolf Firkusny on the RCA label. The recording won Europe’s prestigious Diapason d’Or in the same year. She was also a founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Meliora String Quartet, which was Quartet-in-Residence at the Spoleto Festivals of the U.S., Italy, and Australia, and which recorded Mendelssohn’s Octet with the Cleveland Quartet on the Telarc label. She was most recently a member of the Mendelssohn String Quartet. Maria has participated in numerous festivals including Aspen, Vancouver, Santa Fe, Tanglewood, La Jolla, Caramoor, Helsinki, Norfolk, Rockport, and New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival, among others. She has also performed with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and with the Guarneri, Cleveland, Juilliard, Muir, Brentano, Borromeo, Colorado, and Orion Quartets, among others. Maria is currently a member of the chamber music faculty of the Peabody Conservatory. Yellow Barn musician and Yellow Barn faculty member (2000-2023)
Nicholas Mann, violin and viola, was a founding violinist and member of the Mendelssohn String Quartet for over 30 years. He is a faculty member and chair of the string department at the Manhattan School of Music, and a faculty member at the Juilliard School. He is a former faculty member of Harvard University, the Hartt School, and the North Carolina School for the Arts. Nicholas has participated in the Ravinia, Aspen, Mostly Mozart, Music Academy of the West, Young Artists Program in Ottawa, and Santa Fe festivals. He is president of the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation and President of the Board of Trustees of Yellow Barn. Yellow Barn musician (since 1999-2024) and Young Artists Program faculty member
Lukas Papenfusscline, actor and musician, works exclusively in collaborative spaces and focus on using queer temporality to connect ancient art practices with contemporary experimentation. A sought-after vocalist in opera and crossover genres, Lukas specializes in medieval and new music, while also leading a band, mammifères, that adapts traditional songs through ethnic chaos. As a theatre artist, they create, direct, and produce intimate performance based on found material, embodied research, and alternative documentation. Recently they appeared at La MaMa, the Wallis-Annenberg Center, the Getty Villa, NYPL, Joe's Pub, Club Passim, and the New Ohio theatre, and have worked alongside Eve Beglarian, Kate Soper, and Ran Blake. Lukas has appeared in several FourLarks productions, including Frankenstein, Katabasis, Undine, and Hymns. Lukas is currently living between New York City and Köln, Germany.
Dr. Lisa Wong is an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Arts and Humanities Initiative at HMS dedicated to the integration of the arts and sciences. As a musician as well as a pediatrician at Milton Pediatric Associates, she served as president of the Longwood Symphony Orchestra for 21 years, where she helped design its signature "Healing Art of Music Program." During the Covid-19 pandemic, she helped create Boston Hope Music, offering virtual music performances to patients and healthcare workers. Dr. Wong teaches a course on music, health, and education at Harvard College and leads a museum-based medical education fellowship. She serves on the boards of Conservatory Lab Charter School, A Far Cry ensemble, and the Boston PS Arts Expansion initiative. Nationally, she contributed to the NASEM committee on arts in STEMM education and serves on the Neuroarts Blueprint scientific committee. She is working with the Massachusetts Cultural Council to launch Arts on Prescription, an innovative health initiative. Dr. Wong is the author of Scales to Scalpels: Doctors Who Practice the Healing Arts of Music and Medicine.