PUTNEY, Vt. – If you have never walked through the serene habitat of a wooded forest listening to selected works of Beethoven, then perhaps, you have never stepped foot into the woods.

In existence for nearly 50 years, Yellow Barn, based in Putney, Vermont, is an international center for chamber music that encourages discovery in the studio, classroom, and concert hall and allows for the exploration of the craft of musical interpretation.

Under the leadership of artistic director Seth Knopp, participants in Yellow Barn’s summer festival explore music spanning a wide range of eras and genres alongside faculty members who are among the most highly regarded performers and pedagogues of our time.

This year, Yellow Barn has introduced one of its master projects, entitled “Beethoven Walks.” These walks incorporate reproductions of Beethoven’s sketches, or leaves from his autograph manuscripts, connecting those walking the path with Beethoven’s music, his creative process, and the inspiration he drew from nature.

The project started last fall, when Knopp was thinking of a way to bring celebration to 2020 for Beethoven, in the year of his 250th birthday, but in the form of something visual.

“For me, it was a problem to focus on Beethoven when in a way, musicians everywhere are always focused on Beethoven, playing directly his pieces or composers that have been of course undeniably influenced by him,” he said. “So it occurred to me that one gift to Beethoven that would be meaningful and that he could enjoy perhaps in the same way the rest of us mortals do would be visual works made in response to his music. There is a small group of local artists who are as we speak, working on that project. One of the things that I showed them were some of Beethoven’s autographed manuscripts and some of his autographed sketch books.”

When the reality of COVID-19 began to sink in around mid-March, Knopp said it occurred to him that “Beethoven Walks” would be a way for people to connect to music in solitude in a way that also celebrated Beethoven and his creative process.

Yellow Barn executive director and project producer Catherine Stephan said it was all important that Yellow Barn sponsor the first two “Beethoven Walks.”

“‘Beethoven Walks’ is a project that will live on, and exist in other parts of the country,” she said. “‘BW’ will be created on trails in other places. But when the pandemic hit, we circled the wagon, so to speak and decided that this was imperative along with a few other initiatives at Yellow Barn, as a way of connecting to our community at a time when we are all isolated. Isolation is usually not part of being a chamber musician, or an audience, but listening certainly is and connecting in other ways.”

In terms of Stephan’s working with Knopp, that partnership is not something new to them. About five years ago, they created Yellow Barn Music ‘Haul,’ a self-contained traveling stage.

“It was a similar partnership in the sense that Seth had the artistic creation and then somehow, we figured out how to produce it even though it didn’t exist before,” Stephan noted.

Knopp said that for anybody who is not familiar with Beethoven’s process but is familiar with his music, “Beethoven Walks” is a new way of knowing him.

“I had seen his sketches and autographed manuscripts before,” he said. “I hadn’t fallen as deeply obsessed with them as I have become, and I think that it’s a new way of knowing Beethoven – these pages that one sees on the trails, they represent a time with his work that was in a kind of formative stage. We know that he did a lot of his writing in pocket sketch books that he would take on walks through nature.”

Beethoven, according to Knopp, was “devoutly connected to nature and felt that this was something that sustained him.”

Yellow Barn purposely did not call the program, “Beethoven Walk,” but plural, “walks,” to imagine the composer on the trails with the sights and sounds of nature, enhanced by the creative genius of Beethoven himself.

“Beethoven Walks” currently feature two trails, the Greenwood Trail on Putney’s Greenwood School campus and the Hannum Trail on Putney Mountain. Yellow Barn has gifted the Greenwood Trail walk to the Greenwood School. At the request of the Putney Mountain association, the Hannum Trail will close on July 18th. The Greenwood Trail will run indefinitely.

“The idea was to imagine him on the trails with us,” Knopp said. “Sometimes from a distance, it’s hard to decipher what the notes are or the dynamic or tempo indications. But sometimes they are quite close on the path. Sometimes you’ll find them in what we call, ‘sitting places.’ I chose very simple terminology. Places where one sits and listens, and there are other times when one is drawn along the path, either listening to music or sometimes in silence with just his sketches.”

Although a person might be inspired by a certain setting, not all the music that comes of that person, in this case, Beethoven, fits every setting,

“The Vienna woods is not so dissimilar from Vermont,” Knopp added. “But some of Beethoven’s more heroic music, some that people probably know like his Fifth Symphony, for instance, I think would be more suited to a trail in Yosemite than in the woodland environment of Vermont.”

Knopp said it was interesting that so much of Beethoven’s gentle music, but not only that gentle music, fits into the natural world.

Visitors to “BW” may download an app on their phone, which directs them to certain selections of music at certain points in the walk on the trails.

“When I was first thinking about this, I had the idea of listening on headphones or EarPods, and I asked Catherine to come test this with me,” Knopp recalled. “We soon found that we were very aware of the crinkling of our clothing, with our ears plugged and our breathing. And it was masking an absolutely essential part of the experience.”

Instead, an app was created for each trail. The app includes the playlist for the trail and also includes other information, particularly about the sketches and the manuscripts that a visitor is about to see.

“You essentially have a program with you as you walk the trail,” Stephan said. “And as you walk the trail, you come to ‘music posts,’ and those posts indicate that you are supposed to play the next selection. It’s really designed to be listened to through just the speaker of your phone, to add to the beautiful elements already present in the woods.”

If it sounds challenging to match the scenery to a distinct piece of music, Knopp said “it is.”

“I have to say that I spent 200 or 300 hours on these two trails,” he continued. “In the three months that I started, there was a huge snowstorm. I chose every tree and we chose every height on the tree, that the banners, on which you’ll find the sketches, fastened to the trees with bungee cords.”

Stephan made over 600 bungee cords so that the banners, etched with his manuscripts, could be displayed on trees.

“We didn’t want to nail anything to the trees,” Knopp said. “They wrap around the tree and we had a bevy of young people, younger than we are, to climb the tall ladders. But when you take the walk, you’ll see that it’s shockingly high and the idea is that the woods speak. Beethoven said that the woods spoke to him. He drew not only inspiration, but solace there.”

The complication of the detail of making this happen, Knopp said, is fortunately not felt when a person takes the walk.

“I’m hoping that people are feeling a simply pure experience,” he said. “Out in nature and combined with Beethoven, it’s kind of a magical combination.”

“Beethoven Walks” is free and open to the public.

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