A New Site in 2022

The Chamber Music Conference is pleased and excited to announce that the 2022 Conference will take place at Colgate University .

The Conference selected Colgate, a private liberal arts college in Hamilton, NY, to be its next site, after an extensive search. As we bid farewell to Bennington College, we look forward to welcoming you to Colgate in 2022.

The Colgate campus, set on a hill with broad vistas of the rural Chenango Valley in central New York, has frequently been recognized as one of the most beautiful college campuses in the United States. The Conference will concentrate its activities around the academic quad in the upper level of the campus.

Memorial Chapel, visually attractive and acoustically excellent, will be the venue for our faculty concert series. For coaching sessions and free playing, we will use seminar rooms and study rooms in our dorms, and classrooms in two academic buildings on the quad. Several of the coaching spaces are very large, and many have generous natural light; all are air-conditioned.

The Chapel has two superb concert pianos, and Colgate will provide high-quality pianos for us to use in coaching and free playing.

We will be housed primarily in two dormitories that opened for use in May 2019. Each dorm has bedrooms on the upper floors; a spacious lounge, other common spaces, a kitchen, and laundry on the lower floors; and an outdoor terrace. The dorms are air-conditioned, and each bedroom has its own thermostat. Supplementing the dorms, and suitable especially for families and those preferring more privacy, will be apartments that offer suite-style configurations, with bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room in each unit. We will take meals in the main dining hall at the University; the dining service readily accommodates special diets.

All of the buildings we will use have accessible entrances, and the dorms and academic buildings have elevators.

Colgate has excellent exercise and recreation facilities, including a large fitness center, an Olympic-size swimming pool, and extensive running trails. We will have use of the University library, and also on campus are an art gallery and an anthropology museum. Beyond campus, the town of Hamilton offers small-town charm with a variety of restaurants and shops, and the surrounding area includes several state parks and the village of Cooperstown, with Glimmerglass Opera, the Baseball Hall of Fame, and museums.

The Conference has had successful experience at Colgate. In 2001, when Bennington College was unable to make four weeks available to us, we operated our first week at Colgate, and feedback from a survey at the end of that week was overwhelmingly positive. In 2022, we expect to improve on that experience with more comfortable and more accessible facilities for coaching and housing. Please plan to join us!