Musical Sunrises
An adult music camp has provided unexpected benefits to the easternmost town in the United States.
A lucky star hovers over the tiny Washington County town of Lubec.
That's what Bruce Potterton, founder and director of SummerKeys, believes. "Things happen to me here that just don't happen anywhere else."
SummerKeys is a summer music program for adults, perhaps the only program in the country that states boldly and proudly:
"No admission requirements." Founded in 1992, it offers intensive one-week workshops in a variety of instruments, among them piano (both classical and jazz), cello, violin, flute, guitar, and even oddities like Baroque Ensemble.It attracts a wide range of students from across the country, and even Japan and Holland. There are those who've never had a chance to learn an instrument and those who gave up lessons during the hormone-charged fury of adolescence and haven't played since. Some have mastered one instrument and want to take up another; others are advanced musicians training for performance. "Our philosophy is 'You walk through our doors and we will teach you,' " Potterton says.
But what's lucky about Lubec? It's not a town that has seen much luck lately. The easternmost town in the United States, it is situated at the tip of a peninsula, practically swimming distance across Lubec Narrows from Canada's Campobello Island. It is a town that feels far away even from places that are already far away.
The last real stroke of luck occurred during World War II, when the Norwegian canned fish supply was cut off. Lubec and other towns ramped up production to fill the need. According to the Lubec Historical Society's president, Ron Pesha, the town's thriving fish-packing industry at its peak filled 350 million cans a year, primarily with sardines but also with salmon and smoked herring. The leftovers were whipped into cat food. A 1943 article in the Saturday Evening Post gives the flavor of Lubec's heyday: "As we walked along Lubec's waterfront in the misty morn, the [cannery] whistle sounded again, three blasts this time. The streets filled with laughing, chattering women in gay flowered prints covered by multicolored rubberized aprons; the packing crew was hustling down to put our fish into cans." With such demand, men fished and women packed. Given so many two-income families, the article states, "No Maine town sends a larger proportion of its boys and girls to college. An astonishingly large number of Lubec's sons and daughters come back from college, settle down in the old home town, get married, and catch and pack sardines."
A rosy picture, indeed, but one that was progressively dulled over the decades through overfishing, changing tastes and technology, as well as industry consolidation. Like many northern Maine towns with an eroded manufacturing base, Lubec saw its population shrink by nearly two-thirds since its heyday, to 1,652 souls as of the 2000 census.
A walk along the waterfront tells the story. Not a single packing plant remains today. Although two dilapidated McCurdy Fish Company smokehouses have been partially restored through the efforts of a local group, and Mulholland's Market has been turned into an art gallery, there are only a few brightly painted buildings along a desolate strip. On a fine Friday afternoon in July, there are no cars passing on the street. A lone dog takes advantage of the solitude to amble across the street and flop down on the other side.
Statistics repeat the story. Washington County remains the poorest county in Maine, one of only two states whose economies shrank in 2005. (The other was Louisiana, devastated by Hurricane Katrina.) Lubec itself is one of the poorest towns in the county. 2000 census figures show almost 29 percent of the town's population living below the federal poverty line, and more than 30 percent of households reported less than ten thousand dollars in annual income. That same year, Lubec's unemployment rate of 7 percent was more than double the state of Maine's.
What it lacks in money, though, Lubec makes up for in heartbreakingly beautiful surroundings. If views could be canned, Lubec would be rich. Look to the east and the tall pines of Campobello Island form a backdrop to Mulholland Light. To the southeast, the island of Grand Manan rises like a blue biscuit. A sunset viewed from the town wharf is so perfect — flame-rimmed magenta clouds, rippling blackberry water, and nine fishing boats quietly at anchor, all facing in the same direction — that it looks like life imitating art.
This is where serendipity comes in. In 1991, Potterton, a New Jersey resident and longtime piano teacher at Manhattan's Turtle Bay Music School and the Henry Street Settlement School, was touring Down East with friends. They stumbled upon Lubec and were captivated by its beauty. "When I saw that houses there were selling for the price of used cars," he says, "I bought one." The first night he spent in the house, he was struck with a wicked case of buyer's remorse. Listening to a Nor'easter play Fifty-Two Pickup with the house shingles, he says, "I thought: 'What have I done? I'm eleven-and-a-half hours from New York City. What am I going to do with a house all the way up here?' " Then he remembered boyhood summers spent on Cape Cod, swimming and playing the piano, and the idea of starting a summer piano program came to him: part practice, part vacation.
On that same trip, he bought a little painting of a ship at a secondhand shop only because it had been reduced from $5 to $3.95. It turned out to be by Antonio Jacobsen, the prolific nineteenth-century master painter of ships, and Sotheby's sold it for $5,500. That lucky money bought three pianos and outfitted two practice rooms in Potterton's house. He sent out a press release, announcing the program's first session in the summer of 1992, and his luck held. The Washington Post ran the news on the first page of its travel section. Fifty piano students showed up that first summer. "And I was the only teacher," Potterton exclaims. Cellist Peter Lewy joined him the next summer to launch the cello program, and other workshops followed. More bed-and-breakfasts opened in Lubec.
SummerKeys, a nonprofit corporation, is now self-sustaining through tuitions. Teachers are mainly recruited from the New York area, and have often trained at the best conservatories in the country; a number have performed with major or regional orchestras.
"Growing up, I was a terrible student in all ways," he says. "But I was fortunate to have studied with good piano teachers." Later he was a student of Sascha Gorodnitzki of the Juilliard School and made a career of teaching piano and concertizing. He has an unassuming manner, the healthy look of a brushed peach, and at seventy-one, the energy level of a much younger man. (He's also a realist, and has already arranged for a successor should he be unable to carry on the program.) In addition to his other administrative duties, he teaches piano all summer, dashing from lesson to lesson in a jaunty summer straw hat with a plaid band and sustained by the jam jar of cold tea he carries with him.
Between two hundred and two hundred fifty students come to Lubec each summer for at least a week. A peak week finds as many as sixty students in town. Scraps of music float in the air from some of the thirteen pianos owned by SummerKeys. Ensemble groups can be spotted playing outdoors in the garden behind the buildings on Bayview Street. Reservations at the elegant and delicious Home Port Inn restaurant are hard to come by. But musicians are solitary creatures, and many participants also welcome the opportunity to focus exclusively on practicing.
Thirty percent come for more than a week. An astounding 65 percent come back, some many times. "This is my fourth summer," says cellist Elliott Zaref. "I started playing cello when I was fourteen — that's sixty years ago already — and I played off and on through the years." The program reignited his interest, and now, "The first thing I do with each new calendar is mark my July week at SummerKeys."
Because the program does not provide housing, the mostly middle-aged and older (read: affluent) students find accommodations in Lubec and the surrounding area. Reliable figures about their economic impact on the town are not available, but some quick math says that at least 1,400 bed nights would be involved each summer, not counting those for any additional family members. And everyone needs to eat, though the sign at the local restaurant, Uncle Kippy's — "Stop in to eat or we'll both starve" — is a bit hyperbolic. Not all the money remains in Lubec, of course. Nearby Whiting and Campobello Island have accommodations, though students say they prefer to stay in town where everything is within walking distance.
Lubec bed-and-breakfast owners like Sue and Dennis Baker of the Peacock House note the effect of SummerKeys. "From a business perspective, having a population of people who return every summer is huge for the town," says Sue Baker. "Our guests make their reservations for the next summer when they leave."
Some SummerKeys students such as Carol Rundberg, Potterton's administrative assistant, like the town so much that they have bought houses there, too. Rundberg is now the proprietor — having "bought more house than I intended" — of a rooming house, Spring & Summer. To date, six houses have been bought by SummerKeys participants, in addition to the three that Potterton has purchased. "Any time anyone buys a house here, it's good for us," says Eric Lookabaugh, owner for the last thirty years of Lubec Hardware. "The program has definitely had a positive effect. We're very lucky to have had this happen here."
Suzanne Plaut, head librarian at Lubec Memorial Library, echoes his sentiments. "It has been a wonderful thing for the town," she says, adding that the musicians and students are an interesting and amiable group of people.
The feeling is mutual. "The towns-people have been wonderful to us," says Potterton. Rundberg is even more direct. "SummerKeys couldn't exist without Lubec," she remarks. A reciprocal relationship has developed. For example, three churches in town lend their space for piano students, and over the years, SummerKeys has provided or upgraded their pianos and continues to tune and maintain them. In turn the churches, their congregations, and local piano teachers are free to use them during the winter.
Each Wednesday evening during July and August, The Mary Potterton Memorial Concert series, named after Potterton's mother, offers a free concert performed by faculty members or invited professionals. The musicians often say they've never seen an audience so appreciative, and they feel free to play challenging pieces seldom heard at summer concerts. The series has become so well attended that a special ferry now runs from Eastport on Wednesday evenings to serve concert-goers. Local businesses provide free refreshments at intermission, which gives them publicity they might not have had otherwise. Although their appeal is mainly to summer people, the concerts provide a dose of high culture that seldom reaches this far Down East.
SummerKeys has also inspired a nascent art program, Summer Brushes, run by painter and illustrator Shawn Costello. "SummerKeys was an influence for me. I thought a summer art program could do the same, and be a welcome neighbor," she says. Costello conducts week-long painting classes for beginning to advanced painters, who draw inspiration from Lubec's extraordinary scenery by painting outdoors, en plein air.
It's easy to be starry-eyed about the potential transformation of a town through music. From "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!" to The Music Man, music as an agency of change has deep roots in American culture. And it's wonderful to imagine that the switch from a manufacturing-based economy to the much-talked-about "creative economy" might be under way in Lubec. But the number of SummerKeys students is still small, and the program only runs for two months in the summer. From the perspective of year-round residents, Lubec's struggling economy needs much more than that to survive. Town selectman Bill Daye says that fishing still provides most income in the town. The town's biggest employers are the Regional Medical Center and the school system, which now graduates only nine or ten students each year. Governor Baldacci's 2003 initiative resulted in a Pine Tree Zone designation, meaning that a 123-acre parcel off Route 189 is eligible for tax advantages for any company involved in specific industries and willing to relocate. Thus far, there have been no takers. "We're willing to talk to anyone," Daye says.
The very remoteness that blesses Lubec with dazzling views works against job creation. Mike McCabe, president of the Cobscook Bay Area Chamber of Commerce, feels that things are beginning to turn around in the town, but notes, "notwithstanding its tremendous scenic beauty, Lubec's location at the end of a peninsula and the small population base makes it difficult to draw companies there in competition with other communities in the state." He also points out that arts-based communities take many years to establish. The Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport, for instance, has twenty years on SummerKeys. But might this be the beginning for Lubec?
IF YOU GO
For more information about SummerKeys, visit www.summerkeys.com , call 207-733-2316, or write to SummerKeys, c/o Bruce Potterton, 6 Bayview St., Lubec, ME 04652.
That's what Bruce Potterton, founder and director of SummerKeys, believes. "Things happen to me here that just don't happen anywhere else."
SummerKeys is a summer music program for adults, perhaps the only program in the country that states boldly and proudly:
"No admission requirements." Founded in 1992, it offers intensive one-week workshops in a variety of instruments, among them piano (both classical and jazz), cello, violin, flute, guitar, and even oddities like Baroque Ensemble.It attracts a wide range of students from across the country, and even Japan and Holland. There are those who've never had a chance to learn an instrument and those who gave up lessons during the hormone-charged fury of adolescence and haven't played since. Some have mastered one instrument and want to take up another; others are advanced musicians training for performance. "Our philosophy is 'You walk through our doors and we will teach you,' " Potterton says.
But what's lucky about Lubec? It's not a town that has seen much luck lately. The easternmost town in the United States, it is situated at the tip of a peninsula, practically swimming distance across Lubec Narrows from Canada's Campobello Island. It is a town that feels far away even from places that are already far away.
The last real stroke of luck occurred during World War II, when the Norwegian canned fish supply was cut off. Lubec and other towns ramped up production to fill the need. According to the Lubec Historical Society's president, Ron Pesha, the town's thriving fish-packing industry at its peak filled 350 million cans a year, primarily with sardines but also with salmon and smoked herring. The leftovers were whipped into cat food. A 1943 article in the Saturday Evening Post gives the flavor of Lubec's heyday: "As we walked along Lubec's waterfront in the misty morn, the [cannery] whistle sounded again, three blasts this time. The streets filled with laughing, chattering women in gay flowered prints covered by multicolored rubberized aprons; the packing crew was hustling down to put our fish into cans." With such demand, men fished and women packed. Given so many two-income families, the article states, "No Maine town sends a larger proportion of its boys and girls to college. An astonishingly large number of Lubec's sons and daughters come back from college, settle down in the old home town, get married, and catch and pack sardines."
A rosy picture, indeed, but one that was progressively dulled over the decades through overfishing, changing tastes and technology, as well as industry consolidation. Like many northern Maine towns with an eroded manufacturing base, Lubec saw its population shrink by nearly two-thirds since its heyday, to 1,652 souls as of the 2000 census.
A walk along the waterfront tells the story. Not a single packing plant remains today. Although two dilapidated McCurdy Fish Company smokehouses have been partially restored through the efforts of a local group, and Mulholland's Market has been turned into an art gallery, there are only a few brightly painted buildings along a desolate strip. On a fine Friday afternoon in July, there are no cars passing on the street. A lone dog takes advantage of the solitude to amble across the street and flop down on the other side.
Statistics repeat the story. Washington County remains the poorest county in Maine, one of only two states whose economies shrank in 2005. (The other was Louisiana, devastated by Hurricane Katrina.) Lubec itself is one of the poorest towns in the county. 2000 census figures show almost 29 percent of the town's population living below the federal poverty line, and more than 30 percent of households reported less than ten thousand dollars in annual income. That same year, Lubec's unemployment rate of 7 percent was more than double the state of Maine's.
What it lacks in money, though, Lubec makes up for in heartbreakingly beautiful surroundings. If views could be canned, Lubec would be rich. Look to the east and the tall pines of Campobello Island form a backdrop to Mulholland Light. To the southeast, the island of Grand Manan rises like a blue biscuit. A sunset viewed from the town wharf is so perfect — flame-rimmed magenta clouds, rippling blackberry water, and nine fishing boats quietly at anchor, all facing in the same direction — that it looks like life imitating art.
This is where serendipity comes in. In 1991, Potterton, a New Jersey resident and longtime piano teacher at Manhattan's Turtle Bay Music School and the Henry Street Settlement School, was touring Down East with friends. They stumbled upon Lubec and were captivated by its beauty. "When I saw that houses there were selling for the price of used cars," he says, "I bought one." The first night he spent in the house, he was struck with a wicked case of buyer's remorse. Listening to a Nor'easter play Fifty-Two Pickup with the house shingles, he says, "I thought: 'What have I done? I'm eleven-and-a-half hours from New York City. What am I going to do with a house all the way up here?' " Then he remembered boyhood summers spent on Cape Cod, swimming and playing the piano, and the idea of starting a summer piano program came to him: part practice, part vacation.
On that same trip, he bought a little painting of a ship at a secondhand shop only because it had been reduced from $5 to $3.95. It turned out to be by Antonio Jacobsen, the prolific nineteenth-century master painter of ships, and Sotheby's sold it for $5,500. That lucky money bought three pianos and outfitted two practice rooms in Potterton's house. He sent out a press release, announcing the program's first session in the summer of 1992, and his luck held. The Washington Post ran the news on the first page of its travel section. Fifty piano students showed up that first summer. "And I was the only teacher," Potterton exclaims. Cellist Peter Lewy joined him the next summer to launch the cello program, and other workshops followed. More bed-and-breakfasts opened in Lubec.
SummerKeys, a nonprofit corporation, is now self-sustaining through tuitions. Teachers are mainly recruited from the New York area, and have often trained at the best conservatories in the country; a number have performed with major or regional orchestras.
"Growing up, I was a terrible student in all ways," he says. "But I was fortunate to have studied with good piano teachers." Later he was a student of Sascha Gorodnitzki of the Juilliard School and made a career of teaching piano and concertizing. He has an unassuming manner, the healthy look of a brushed peach, and at seventy-one, the energy level of a much younger man. (He's also a realist, and has already arranged for a successor should he be unable to carry on the program.) In addition to his other administrative duties, he teaches piano all summer, dashing from lesson to lesson in a jaunty summer straw hat with a plaid band and sustained by the jam jar of cold tea he carries with him.
Between two hundred and two hundred fifty students come to Lubec each summer for at least a week. A peak week finds as many as sixty students in town. Scraps of music float in the air from some of the thirteen pianos owned by SummerKeys. Ensemble groups can be spotted playing outdoors in the garden behind the buildings on Bayview Street. Reservations at the elegant and delicious Home Port Inn restaurant are hard to come by. But musicians are solitary creatures, and many participants also welcome the opportunity to focus exclusively on practicing.
Thirty percent come for more than a week. An astounding 65 percent come back, some many times. "This is my fourth summer," says cellist Elliott Zaref. "I started playing cello when I was fourteen — that's sixty years ago already — and I played off and on through the years." The program reignited his interest, and now, "The first thing I do with each new calendar is mark my July week at SummerKeys."
Because the program does not provide housing, the mostly middle-aged and older (read: affluent) students find accommodations in Lubec and the surrounding area. Reliable figures about their economic impact on the town are not available, but some quick math says that at least 1,400 bed nights would be involved each summer, not counting those for any additional family members. And everyone needs to eat, though the sign at the local restaurant, Uncle Kippy's — "Stop in to eat or we'll both starve" — is a bit hyperbolic. Not all the money remains in Lubec, of course. Nearby Whiting and Campobello Island have accommodations, though students say they prefer to stay in town where everything is within walking distance.
Lubec bed-and-breakfast owners like Sue and Dennis Baker of the Peacock House note the effect of SummerKeys. "From a business perspective, having a population of people who return every summer is huge for the town," says Sue Baker. "Our guests make their reservations for the next summer when they leave."
Some SummerKeys students such as Carol Rundberg, Potterton's administrative assistant, like the town so much that they have bought houses there, too. Rundberg is now the proprietor — having "bought more house than I intended" — of a rooming house, Spring & Summer. To date, six houses have been bought by SummerKeys participants, in addition to the three that Potterton has purchased. "Any time anyone buys a house here, it's good for us," says Eric Lookabaugh, owner for the last thirty years of Lubec Hardware. "The program has definitely had a positive effect. We're very lucky to have had this happen here."
Suzanne Plaut, head librarian at Lubec Memorial Library, echoes his sentiments. "It has been a wonderful thing for the town," she says, adding that the musicians and students are an interesting and amiable group of people.
The feeling is mutual. "The towns-people have been wonderful to us," says Potterton. Rundberg is even more direct. "SummerKeys couldn't exist without Lubec," she remarks. A reciprocal relationship has developed. For example, three churches in town lend their space for piano students, and over the years, SummerKeys has provided or upgraded their pianos and continues to tune and maintain them. In turn the churches, their congregations, and local piano teachers are free to use them during the winter.
Each Wednesday evening during July and August, The Mary Potterton Memorial Concert series, named after Potterton's mother, offers a free concert performed by faculty members or invited professionals. The musicians often say they've never seen an audience so appreciative, and they feel free to play challenging pieces seldom heard at summer concerts. The series has become so well attended that a special ferry now runs from Eastport on Wednesday evenings to serve concert-goers. Local businesses provide free refreshments at intermission, which gives them publicity they might not have had otherwise. Although their appeal is mainly to summer people, the concerts provide a dose of high culture that seldom reaches this far Down East.
SummerKeys has also inspired a nascent art program, Summer Brushes, run by painter and illustrator Shawn Costello. "SummerKeys was an influence for me. I thought a summer art program could do the same, and be a welcome neighbor," she says. Costello conducts week-long painting classes for beginning to advanced painters, who draw inspiration from Lubec's extraordinary scenery by painting outdoors, en plein air.
It's easy to be starry-eyed about the potential transformation of a town through music. From "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!" to The Music Man, music as an agency of change has deep roots in American culture. And it's wonderful to imagine that the switch from a manufacturing-based economy to the much-talked-about "creative economy" might be under way in Lubec. But the number of SummerKeys students is still small, and the program only runs for two months in the summer. From the perspective of year-round residents, Lubec's struggling economy needs much more than that to survive. Town selectman Bill Daye says that fishing still provides most income in the town. The town's biggest employers are the Regional Medical Center and the school system, which now graduates only nine or ten students each year. Governor Baldacci's 2003 initiative resulted in a Pine Tree Zone designation, meaning that a 123-acre parcel off Route 189 is eligible for tax advantages for any company involved in specific industries and willing to relocate. Thus far, there have been no takers. "We're willing to talk to anyone," Daye says.
The very remoteness that blesses Lubec with dazzling views works against job creation. Mike McCabe, president of the Cobscook Bay Area Chamber of Commerce, feels that things are beginning to turn around in the town, but notes, "notwithstanding its tremendous scenic beauty, Lubec's location at the end of a peninsula and the small population base makes it difficult to draw companies there in competition with other communities in the state." He also points out that arts-based communities take many years to establish. The Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport, for instance, has twenty years on SummerKeys. But might this be the beginning for Lubec?
IF YOU GO
For more information about SummerKeys, visit www.summerkeys.com , call 207-733-2316, or write to SummerKeys, c/o Bruce Potterton, 6 Bayview St., Lubec, ME 04652.
- By: Rebecca Martin Evarts
- Photography by: Chris Becker
