Copland House at Bluestone
Copland House’s next chapter is nestled in the woods on the New York-Connecticut border – about one hour north of the dazzle and din of Lincoln Center and Broadway. This transformative growth is centered on our purchase of the Melrose School at Bluestone Farm, a memorable place of deep potential in a beautiful, welcoming setting, where music can unfold in many ways. This spacious campus invites multiple forms of creation – enabling us to more fully serve and energize generations of composers and other artists, spark the imaginations of young people, cultivate wider audiences, and honor and renew America’s vast cultural heritage.
As home to a vibrant, multi-disciplinary creative community centering the arts in public conversation, Bluestone Farm will equip Copland House to carry out its mission more effectively, through programs that uniquely embrace the entire artistic process, from creation and development to study, presentation, and preservation.
This expansive, unpretentious, and refreshing property will become a place for active music and quiet introspection – qualities characteristic of Copland, one of the most beloved, profoundly influential musical figures in American history. This enterprise indelibly affirms our confidence in the power of ideas, creativity, and expressivity to bring people together. “Art,” Copland said, “summarizes the most basic feelings about being alive.”
Located in Brewster, NY, on ancestral lands of the Munsee-Lenape Tribe, where Westchester, Putnam, and Fairfield Counties meet, Bluestone Farm offers 37,000-square-feet of interior space on 24 wooded acres. Three houses, a chapel, and a large soccer field surround a large, three-wing school building, featuring a simple, strong design with 350 windows bathing the interior in plentiful natural light and inspirational views. Bluestone Farm will be a nexus for all the arts,
a safe space for artistic risk-taking, and a creative meeting point that builds communities, shared experiences, and what Copland called “a continuing state of self-discovery.”
For nearly 50 years, Bluestone Farm was the site of the beloved Melrose School, an Episcopal grade school located where Westchester, Putnam, and Fairfield Counties meet. The property fulfills all of Copland House’s structural, aesthetic, and operational needs, and provides both a serene location and ready public access by car, train, and air. Its multiple buildings and ample acreage and offer sufficient capacity for a multi-purpose, state-of-the-art venue (public and family concerts, recording and filming, educational activities and distance-learning), artist studios (for dance, theater, and visual arts, as well as music) and living quarters, community gathering places administrative offices, and open greenspace.
The heart of the complex is a large, three-wing school building, whose simple, strong design features hundreds of windows that bathe the interior in natural light and affords inspirational views of the surrounding woods. Encircling it are three residential houses, an intimate chapel, small farm outbuildings, and a large outdoor soccer field.