Extra Credit

Music Prof Set to Tour Every Town in Vermont

Use the camera on your phone or tablet or visit

go.uvm.edu/pianotour

to learn more about the tour dates and locations.

By Tucker Houston '22

Professor David Feurzeig wants to play a concert in each of Vermont’s 251 towns.

That’s an ambitious goal, but Feurzeig, who teaches in the Department of Music, is confident he can get it done. He launched the tour May 6 with a concert in UVM’s renovated recital hall, and he’s set a goal of completing it in five years — by the end of 2026 — playing roughly one concert every week.

The concerts are free and take place in venues ranging from opera houses to forest trails. Feurzeig plays the piano, and although he will be the featured player in each concert, he hopes to include local composers and musicians in the performances.

“One (goal) is just the idea of supporting community events and supporting live local performance, contributing to that,” Feurzeig said. “And again, fulfilling and amplifying UVM’s mission to be a resource for the whole state.”

As for the repertoire of the 251 shows, Feurzeig said he wants to include some Vermont-themed music, music about the state, or from local composers. He is looking to play some Abenaki music, or songs based on Abenaki material, too. For his first concert, Feurzeig eyed Beethoven’s first piano sonata, Bach’s first published keyboard suite, and Scarlatti’s first and 251st piano sonatas.

Feurzeig wants to send a couple messages by doing this every-town tour, although he’s reluctant to turn the project into “heavy-handed propaganda.”

First, he wants to show support for community events and the idea of live local performance, which has suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, he hopes to draw attention to “the unsustainability of long-distance touring,” which usually involves flying.

“What unsustainable means is, it’s impossible to keep doing that,” he said. “I just want to show that it’s entirely possible to tour and perform and have a performing culture without hopping on a plane and going all over the world.”

Feurzeig will be traveling from gig to gig in a solar-charged electric car to minimize his emissions.

The music professor emphasized the importance of taking actions like this in local communities.

“If I choose not to fly and I don't tell anybody about it, I'm just erasing a couple of flights here and there,” he said. “If I decide to tell people about it, it normalizes the idea. It's no longer this crazy, wacko thing. And maybe for somebody, the 10th, or the 20th person they hear saying, ‘Oh, you know, I've decided not to fly anymore,’ it no longer feels like an extreme choice to make.”

He added: “Just in my little world of music performance, this is my small act of resistance against the jet-tour model.”