Staunton Music Festival: an eclectic celebration of sound

You don’t have to be a classical music expert to enjoy the Staunton Music Festival. Just be ready to open your ears to both familiar and mind-bending works, and lean into an opportunity to witness world-class musicians at play.

What began over 25 years ago as a casual gathering of friends has grown into an internationally recognized musical bonanza. Each August, the event transforms the heart of this Shenandoah Valley town into a vibrant stage, filling the central business district with a mix of formal concerts and pop-up performances that attract artists and audiences from around the globe.

Carsten Schmidt, founder and artistic director of the event, admits he wasn’t masterminding a grand plan in 1998 when he invited friends from Europe to visit one summer for a casual house party. “We’d hang out, rehearse, drink a lot of beer, put on a few concerts … we did it for fun,” Schmidt says. “Then we said, ‘Let’s do it next year.’ We really didn’t expect it to become this big.” 

Big, indeed. The Staunton Music Festival now presents around 30 events spread across two weekends and the week in between, featuring 80 to 90 musicians each year and drawing thousands of attendees.

The first festival’s $450 budget paid for piano tuning and beer for the musicians, Schmidt says. Times have changed. In 2024, the annual budget was just under $460,000, with more than 50% of revenue coming via donations. And musicians do receive some compensation. “They are very generous to come for minimal fees,” Schmidt says.

The Staunton Music Festival has become known for its wide-ranging program offerings, all of which are conceptualized by Schmidt. One concert in 2024 featured music from the 14th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries on both period and modern instruments. 

“I don’t know of any other place where you can experience so many different things that seem to connect,” Schmidt says. “We will do an occasional all-Baroque program, but most programs are quite mixed. That’s by design. I’m very unapologetic about it. It’s like everything else: The broader your spectrum, the more enriched you are.”

Jason Stell, the festival’s executive director, says Schmidt’s vision is what fuels the festival. “He has years’ worth of programs in his head,” Stell says. “He loves programs that challenge and shock you a little bit. For this year, the opening night is a staged [Handel’s] ‘Messiah,’ then a cabaret night. He loves that contrast.”

Stell first became involved with the festival as a performer in a Renaissance vocal group in the early 2000s. He and his family moved to Staunton in 2006, and he took on administrative duties, which grew over time. Now he and Schmidt collaborate seamlessly. “Carsten creates the programs and picks the players; I try to make it happen,” Stell says. “We work well together.”

The festival is an easy sell to musicians, Stell says, pointing to the creative programming, local families who host performers in their homes, and the appeal of Staunton itself. “What’s great about our festival is that we have that high level of musicianship on stage, but behind the scenes, we’ve built up a kind of family experience,” Stell says. “The audience sees artists having a good time on stage and being engaged with one another. We’ve had great folks from the beginning who knew Carsten and believed in what he was trying to do. He would give them stuff they weren’t playing anywhere else or have them lead a chamber piece.”

That mix of sound appeals to musicians too. “It’s like no other festival,” says Kris Kwapis, who teaches Baroque trumpet and cornetto at Indiana University Bloomington and has been playing at the festival for a decade. “I am constantly amazed that people maybe come to see a Bach cantata, but also on the program is a piece by [20th century composer] John Cage where the percussionists are fluffing leaves or rolling dice to determine the rhythm,” she says. “Carsten has a gift for putting pieces together that on the surface may seem unrelated, but they are intrinsically, quite impressive. [Performers] are almost always at the concerts when we’re not playing. Seats are set aside so we can support each other and see what everyone is doing.” 

Nicholas DiEugenio, associate professor of violin at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a performer on both modern and Baroque violins, says the festival hits all the right notes for performers. “There’s definitely a family feeling; for a lot of the artists it’s part of their calendar, and they look forward to it.” DiEugenio says. “And there’s a commitment to performing all of the works in a way that is true to the compositional world of the composer. With pieces from 17th century northern Germany, we really try to set up our instruments [as they would have been then]. It’s cool the way Carsten programs; he’ll put something by a living composer next to something by a composer who’s been dead 500 years. I find that as an artist very stimulating.”

The festival also stimulates Staunton, with more than half of the attendees coming from out of state. There is a notable increase in restaurant and retail sales during the 10-day August celebration. “It’s massively beneficial,” says Samantha Johnson, Staunton’s director of tourism. “The beauty of the festival is that it really acts in some ways as an unofficial tour guide because the festival and performers don’t stay in one place.” 

Artistic Director Schmidt says the festival and town are intrinsically intertwined. “I can’t separate the festival from the community — it would be financially and logistically impossible without the community,” he says. “Staunton is such a special place. The right things happened at the right time to make the festival happen here.”

The Staunton Music Festival is held August 15–24, 2025. Learn more about individual performances, and purchase tickets at stauntonmusicfestival.org.