During the summer of 1973, a chamber music festival was inaugurated in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals was the festival’s honorary president. Fourteen artists performed six Sunday concerts in Santa Fe and toured to several area communities. The promotional poster for the first Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival sported a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe.

The summertime festival—and the Georgia O'Keeffe posters—became a recurring annual tradition. Today, the Festival presents over 80 events, including concerts, adult and youth education/outreach presentations, free open rehearsals, concert previews and roundtable discussions with composers and musicians.

In 1976, a “Composer-in-Residence” program was added to the Festival mix, and featured composers have included Aaron Copland, Ned Rorem, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Since 1980, the Festival has commissioned and premiered many new chamber works.

On today’s date in 1982, for example, this music by the American composer John Harbison debuted at Santa Fe. It’s entitled simply “Variations” for clarinet, violin, and piano. Harbison recalls the first inspiration for the piece was a statue of the Caananite fertility goddess dancing, and so the piece began as a dance set with the titles “Spirit Dance, Body Dance, Soul Dance and Dervish-Finale.” But as the composition process continued, the dance set turned into a set of variations with the same four basic sections.