The Brevard Music Center, a summer institute and festival, teaches gifted young musicians to prepare and perform great musical works at a high artistic level. The Music Center is situated on a wooded 180-acre campus in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. Founded in 1936, the Music Center has matured into one of this country's premier summer training programs and festivals. More than 400 gifted students, ages 14 through post-college, come to the Music Center to study with members of a distinguished artist faculty and with renowned guest artists. For seven weeks, students participate in a vigorous program of instruction that includes ensembles, private lessons, and chamber music. Brevard's hallmark is the powerful sense of community that re-emerges every June, as faculty and students work together to present more than 80 concerts to the public. The total audience each summer numbers more than 30,000. For decades the Brevard Music Center has inspired devotion not only among its students and faculty but also among its listeners and among a vast corps of volunteers. That hundreds of persons have purchased homes in western North Carolina expressly to be near the Brevard Music Center gives some measure of the Center's significance to its community.