More than 100 years into its run, Woodstock’s Maverick Concerts will host its first-ever community-focused open house on Saturday, June 3 from noon until 5:00 PM. Free and open to all, the event highlights Maverick as a community resource and as an emblem of the creative and cooperative spirit that has animated Woodstock culture throughout its history. Music from local artists will run all day, while other venerable Woodstock organizations provide food, environmental and cultural programs, and some high-end imaginative play and learning opportunities for young people.
While Maverick—the venue and its programs—are mostly known these days as a woodland outpost for imported cosmopolitan high culture, the institution’s roots are sunk deep in community—radical notions of community postulated and enacted more than a century ago by the writer and freethinker Hervey White. A promising young midwestern literary aspirant with deep socialist feelings and little patience for the arts establishment, White was drawn to the Catskills by the Englishman Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, a man with the means and the will to get into the utopian arts colony business: Byrdcliffe, the campus of which still survives and functions on a hill on the other side of town.
At the turn of the century, crafts guilds and arts colonies were in fashion among wealthy Europeans, inspired principally by the writings of the Victorian philosopher John Ruskin and his distaste for dehumanizing industrialism. Such idealistic proof-of-concept experiments championed cooperative values and alternative models to the uninvested specialization of industrial labor, but in the hands of upper class Englishmen, they often took a messianic turn. It required a maverick American to kind of make it stick.
White split from Whitehead over a squabble about milk distribution (in one version of the story) and formed the Maverick, a fluid, ramshackle arts community that filled up its guestbook with a who’s who of 20th century artists, thinkers, and composers. Today, Maverick Concerts is—as every feature story about it begins—the oldest running continuous chamber music series in the United States. Each summer, some of the world’s finest small classical ensembles, solo performers, and classical-adjacent virtuosi from the Jazz, World, and Folk genres visit Maverick Hall, a rustic but strangely proto-psychedelic barn-like structure situated, like a hallucinated oasis, in the forest outside of town. Hervey White built Maverick Hall himself. It’s an extraordinary venue, acoustically and visually, and it stands as a resonating reminder that Woodstock is a freakshow of a provenance far older than the pink house.
But you already knew all of that.
On Saturday, June 3, Maverick turns its hallowed stage over to a variety of gifted local ensembles. A subset of the vaunted Hudson valley choral group Ars Choralis, the a cappella men’s ensemble the Quarantinis kick off the day’s music at 1:00 PM. As the name cheekily implies, the Quarantinis formed at the height of the Covid shut down. Their first undertaking was the Beach Boys rewrite, “In My Zoom.” The Quarantinis’ Open House appearance comes not long before their parent ensemble Ars Choralis will perform Johannes Brahms’ epic German Requiem on the same stage (June 24, 25).
The Quarantinis will be followed by two youth ensembles. At 2:00 PM, the Onteora Chamber Ensemble takes the stage. An elite small orchestra of high school players drawn from the school’s various music programs, the Chamber Ensemble performs frequently outside the confines of the school. They will be followed at 3:00 PM by another Onteora High School select ensemble, the Bennett Jazz Ensemble and Youth Chorale.
Finally at 4:00 PM, the Mid Hudson Classical Guitar Quartet will perform a program studded with staples of the classical guitar repertoire as well as current and classic selections from the pop and rock canons. The brainchild of guitarist, arranger, and educator Greg Dinger—a name familiar to regional classical music fans for decades—the MHCGQ comprises Dinger and fellow guitarists Russ Austin, Maureen Newman, and Richard Udell. Their program includes works by the stalwarts of the guitar—Fernando Sor, Isaac Albeniz—as well as Dinger’s arrangements of pieces by Mozart, Faure, Sting, and Paul McCartney, among many others.
The Maverick Open House is about community, nature, and art, in no particular order. The region’s long-running, innovative, and wildly successful live action role playing organization The Wayfinder Experience combines all those values in its own culture. Wayfinder members will lead an introduction to LARPing at 1:00 PM. Representatives of the Woodstock Land Conservancy will lead walking tours of the grounds. The venerable Woodstock Library will offer fun family activities.
In its 2023 season, Maverick will be offering onsite food at all its main concerts for the first time, and several of the primary vendors will be demoing their wares at the Open House: craft BBQ from Briskethead and Little Bites from Woodstock Eats. Free ice cream from Nancy’s Artisanal Creamery will be available while supplies last, which should be incentive enough to arrive early and make a day of it at this Woodstock treasure.
For additional information on Maverick Concerts and its 2023 season, visitmaverickconcerts.org. The Maverick Concert Hall is located at 120 Maverick Road, Woodstock.
Join the family! 
