“Fans of the Token Creek Festival, Dane County’s original summer chamber music series, are readying themselves for multiple weekends of top-tier classical music and jazz performances,” writes Michael Muckian in Thursday’s (8/15) Isthmus (Madison, WI). “The concert series, which turns 30 on Aug. 26, is held annually in a 100-year-old barn on land owned by [composer] John and Rose Mary Harbison [his wife, a violinist]….. The Harbisons, both in their 80s with health concerns, would like the performances to continue into the future, as would the festival’s 11-member board…. The couple’s 110-acre property that backs up against Token Creek … is the last privately held land south of Highway 19 located in Dane County’s ‘green corridor’ … designed to protect and preserve the area’s last cold-water trout streams…. Rose Mary would like to see the property preserved as a single natural parcel. Dane County would like that as well…. The Harbisons are interested in ceding the land to the public domain [but] are withholding the 35 developed acres from any land deal they may make with the county…. ‘We want to turn this part of the property into a quasi-public entity, a place for people to meet and have serious conversations,’ Rose Mary says.”
Posted August 19, 2019
