PUTNEY — Yellow Barn announces the opening of Beethoven Walks, a series of trail walks with accompanying music and reproductions of Beethoven's hand-written sketches and manuscripts, created by Yellow Barn Artistic Director Seth Knopp.
A project with national reach, Yellow Barn has sponsored the first two walks as a gift to its community. Located in Putney, they are free and open to the public.
“These walks open in honor of Beethoven's 250th birthday, and are dedicated to the world his music shows us is possible,” Knopp said in a news release.
Knopp imagined his Beethoven Walks project last fall, as part of a larger visual tribute to Beethoven, a birthday gift of work by five local artists inspired by his music. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Knopp accelerated its creation.
The trails and the walks naturally foster social distancing.
Beethoven Walks currently feature two trails, the Greenwood Trail on Putney's Greenwood School campus and the Hannum Trail on Putney Mountain. Yellow Barn has gifted the Greenwood Trail walk to the Greenwood School. At the request of the Putney Mountain Association, the Hannum Trail will close July 18.
The walks incorporate hundreds of reproductions of Beethoven's sketches, or leaves from his autograph manuscripts, bannered on trees with customized bungee cords. Music Posts placed along the path will prompt people to listen to works corresponding with these sketches and manuscripts.
Over the course of two months, a team of over a dozen people in the local community worked to bring the Beethoven Walks to life, including trail advisor and woodworker Michael Kohout, who built eight benches and 13 music posts specifically for these trails.