MasterWorks Festival Featured in Fort Wayne Paper
Posted by Terry White on June 19, 2009
This morning’s Fort Wayne (IN) Journal-Gazette has a front-page feature in the Weekender section on the MasterWorks Festival that opens this evening in Winona Lake, IN. Here is an excerpt–to read the entire article click here.
Faithful following
Grace College student concerts popular
Steve Penhollow
If you go
What: MasterWorks Festival
When: Today through July 18
Where: Rodeheaver Auditorium and McClain Hall, Grace College at Winona Lake
This weekend’s performances: Faculty recitals at 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday at Rodeheaver Auditorium
Admission: Free; for full schedule of performances, go to www.masterworksfestival.org
If it weren’t for agriculture, northeast Indiana would not have the MasterWorks Festival.
Dr. Patrick Kavanaugh established the festival in 1997 at Houghton College, a picturesque, private Christian college in Houghton, N.Y.
Even though Houghton is only about 70 miles from Buffalo, it is in the midst of some of the richest and least populated farmland in Allegheny County.
In other words, there weren’t a lot of people around in the summer to attend the MasterWorks Festival’s concerts.
“We loved it there,” Kavanaugh says, “but we weren’t getting large enough audiences in the middle of nowhere. I mean, how many farmers were going to come out and see a show? There were more people onstage than out in the seats,” he says. “And that was disheartening.”
So Kavanaugh moved the festival lock, stock, hymns and carols to Grace College at Winona Lake in 2002.
And the concerts have been sold out ever since.
Or they would have been sold out if they weren’t free.
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