Nowadays, They Mine Talent, Not Silver : Music: Like the mountain town that hosts it, the Aspen Music Festival is focused upon intellectual stimulation and spiritual uplift.

In a serene summer evening, as sunlight and sharp shadows crosshatch Aspen Mountain and the last of the day’s para-gliders drops soundlessly onto the baseball field, the town’s pedestrian mall tinkles with Bach violin duos, pop tunes arranged for bassoon ensembles, wind quintets and Beethoven string trios.

Music is everywhere: in the streets; in the Wheeler Opera House, a model of miniature 19th century grandeur in the center of town; in the gleaming, 6-year-old Harris Hall, which is buried underground; up at 11,000 feet on a little plateau with a small tented platform and a 360-degree view of the Sawatch Range; under the leaky, flapping canopy of Beyer-Benedict Tent.

Aspen is also everywhere in music. The Aspen Music Festival and School are 50 years old this summer, and the list of celebrity musicians who first came to study here as children and remain tenaciously loyal includes conductors James Levine and James Conlon, composer Philip Glass, cellist Lynn Harrell (whose father was one of the festival’s founders), and violinists Robert McDuffie, Cho-Liang Lin, Gil Shaham, Joshua Bell, Sarah Chang and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. On any given night during the season, Aspen alumni are performing in virtually every major city in the world.

Music, as well as musicians, often begins here. Carlisle Floyd began writing his opera “Susannah” here in 1951, and Conlon tried it out here before giving a new production of the work its premiere in the spring. Last year, Thomas Adis’ opera, “Powder Her Face,” had its American stage premiere here. This summer in Harris Hall, the Emerson Quartet completed a recording of the Shostakovich cycle it will release later this year.

Aspen is now known for music and powder, but it was born as a grimy silver-mining town. Today’s gilded play land, full of fragrant boutiques and glittering restaurants, still has only half the year-round population it did in the 1880s, when the town was a giddily churning industrial center. The end came in 1893, when it was 14 years old and the U.S. government untied the dollar from silver, hitching it back to gold. Suddenly, Colorado was full of bankrupted magnates and the Rockies were necklaced with old, dead mines.

The music festival began as a curious outcropping of culture in the semi-wilderness. In 1949, when a group of Chicago businessmen organized a convocation here for the bicentennial of Goethe’s birth, Aspen’s roads were unpaved and the now magnificently mahoganied Hotel Jerome was a 50-cent flophouse.

Skiing, however, was coming west, and though the first festival’s performers--Gregor Piatigorsky, Nathan Milstein, Dimitri Mitropoulos and Artur Rubinstein among them--may have amused themselves by feeling as though they were playing a rough frontier town, in fact Aspen was a burgeoning resort.

For all the abundance of wilderness here, space is still considered a precious, fragile asset. In the newspapers, real estate ads offering secluded acres of mountaintop to those in search of ostentatious privacy face off against articles about population surges and editorials fretting over development. Everywhere there is the fear that Aspen is in danger of ritzing itself into another phase of irrelevance.

Festival’s History Mimics the Town’s

The music festival, like the town, has grown in the past 50 years, and today it is a colossus. It presents four or five public events a day throughout its nine-week season, and the school teaches some 900 student conductors, opera singers, violinists, piccolo players, harpists, composers and every other flavor of musician, including virtuosos as young as 8.

But the school, open only during the summer, has quietly begun shrinking. There is no unanimity on what level of enrollment would be ideal, but administrators say that, while they want to maintain the feeling of a busy, bustling place, there is simply no room to put all the people. The music school campus, a handful of wooden buildings around a duck pond a few miles outside of town, is merely the nerve center of a sprawling institution that must go begging for rooms and chairs.

“The real campus is the town of Aspen and the town of Snowmass and the public schools,” says Paul Kantor, a violin teacher. Transportation is a problem.

The structure in most dire need of improvement is the music tent, where nature sometimes intrudes a little too much on art. One night, fat, dank clouds snaked down the ski slopes into the valley before Levine’s performance of Schubert’s “Tragic” Fourth Symphony with the Aspen Chamber Symphony. Soon, a lugubrious drumming of rain contributed to the atmosphere, and rivulets soaked the collars of those sitting in the back row.

The 35-year-old, dilapidated, acoustically unfriendly, 1,850-seat tent will be replaced by a $10-million, year-round structure.

Besides the tent, the festival has added 500-seat Harris Hall and has plans for a new dormitory, but expansion has not been easy. In Aspen, to build is a political act. A square foot of housing here in the wide open spaces costs as much as it does in Manhattan, and every dip of a steam shovel draws preservationist fire.

“How many Aspenites does it take to change a light bulb?” Robert Harth, the burly and vigorous president of both festival and school, says with a sigh. The answer is 25: “One to change it and two dozen to reminisce about how nice the old one was.

“There’s opposition in this town to anything--which is part of what makes it such a great place. You can’t get away with anything.”

The patron saint of both town and festival is Walter Paepcke, who was the chief executive of the Container Corp. of America until his death in 1960 and the sort of enlightened capitalist they don’t make anymore. Paepcke, an Aspenite by marriage, possessed both dewy visions and the businessman’s grit to put them into practice. It was he who initiated the Goethe Bicentennial, founded the Aspen Skiing Co., the music festival and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, provided land for the airport and ran the Hotel Jerome. It was he, too, who coined the term “The Aspen Idea,” a beatific notion of a life balancing physical exercise, intellectual stimulation and spiritual uplift.

Half a century later, Paepcke’s lofty philosophy has become a chamber of commerce dream, as robust retirees buy houses here to enjoy a luxurious cocktail of art and sport.

“Here, concerts are just more fun than they are in thickly carpeted buildings hung with chandeliers,” Harth says enthusiastically. “You’ve got people in hiking boots and shorts sitting in the round in a tent, and you’ve got millionaires sitting next to students and locals holding down three jobs.”

Teachers, Students Perform Side by Side

“It’s all about the kids” is a phrase repeated over and over. Unlike Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s pastoral and pedagogical summer camp in Lenox, Mass., Aspen has five student orchestras, ranging from the haphazardly staffed, rotating Conductor’s Orchestra, to the partly professional Chamber Symphony. The tradition is that kids play alongside their teachers, veterans of the world’s great ensembles who are energized by their students’ focus and fear.

David Zinman, the festival’s new music director, who recently retired as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and is still conductor of the Zurich Tonhalle-Orchester, adores the paternal aspects of his new job. “Now I can keep my eye on someone who’s 9 years old, and over 12 years watch that person blossom into one of the world’s greatest soloists. There are tons of kids coming up now, and I can hear them.”

Zinman paused, as if thinking about a lifetime spent on the podiums of the world’s great orchestras. “Here is where the highest goals are,” he said. “Right here.”