During the school year, the campus at Dublin School is busy with students hurrying to class or to the library, and athletes headed for the gym, fields and ski trails.
But during the summer, the hillside campus is alive with the sounds of music. Since 1983, the Walden School, which describes itself as “part school, part camp, part festival,” has made its home on the Dublin School campus. Children and teens from all over the world come to the campus to study composition, improvisation, group singing, and musicianship.
“Our students have all the normal summer camp experiences — it’s a gorgeous campus, they’re swimming in the lake, they’re hiking, they’re pulling pranks. Today seems to be Senior Prank Day, so I’m not sure what all is going on around here,” said Executive Director Seth Brenzel on Monday. “But they are also all these highly creative kids, and while they’re here, they are able to come together and create, and see their work performed and evolve as musicians and composers.”
Because Dublin School also has a strong music and theater program, the campus includes twenty pianos and several performance spaces.
On Friday, July 31, Walden School will offer the final concert of the summer season, a choral music performance featuring the entire Young Musicians Program 2026 community, including students, faculty, and artists in residence. The concert, which will be directed by Kari Francis, is free and open to the public, and will take place at the Louise Shonk Kelly Recital Hall. The performance starts at 7:30 p.m.
“We’ve been here since 1983, and we have offered a concert series every summer since then,” Brenzel said. “Everyone at Walden School sings in the chorus — the students, the faculty. This is our annual concert that wraps up our program for the summer. It’s a pretty special event, and one that we look forward to every year.”
The school’s programs include the Young Musicians Program, for musicians ages 9-18, and the Creative Musicians Retreat for adults in June.
The Walden School hosts free community concerts, performances, and presentations by resident artists and composers throughout June and July each year.
This week, young musicians are performing their own works as a culmination of the 2026 summer program.
“This week is our festival week, and there will be around 44 world premieres of student work, either complete pieces or excerpts, which Walden School players will perform,” Brenzel said. “We have students from all over the country, from the UK, from China.”
A discussion moderated by school faculty and this year’s YMP Composer in Residence Nathan Davis follows each student premiere.
On Monday, teen composers took turns watching professional musicians perform their works in the Louise Shonk Kelly Recital Hall.
“All the students get to see their work performed for the first time by professional musicians in residence,” Brenzel said. “They’ve all been working on composition as a special topic in class. Each class takes a special topic, like woodwinds or strings, and they do things like building their own string instruments or adapting their existing string instruments. Composition is really the focus of the program.”
According to Brenzel, composition students study works by contemporary composers. All students who come to Walden School study composition, “whether they like it or not,” Brenzel joked.
“The students are all composers. They come as creative musician, and they are all working on creative work as well as working on presenting their compositions in concert. There are always composers in the audience, and they are surrounded by these amazing professionals,” Brenzel said. “It’s really wonderful every year to see what they create.”
For more information about Walden School, go to waldenschool.org.