Rose Mary and John Harbison founded the Token Creek Music Festival on Rose Mary’s family farm.
Fans of the Token Creek Festival, Dane County’s original summer chamber music series, are readying themselves for multiple weekends of top-tier classical music and jazz performances.
The concert series, which turns 30 on Aug. 26, is held annually in a 100-year-old barn on land owned by John and Rose Mary Harbison, just outside of DeForest. The festival will celebrate its anniversary with an additional weekend of jazz starting Aug. 16. Subsequent weekends include one devoted to Brahms, the other showcasing works by Bach, Schoenberg and John Harbison himself. Multiple guest artists will populate the barn’s small stage, performing for audiences of 80 to 100 people.
The theme of this year’s series, “Sanctuary,” speaks to the intellectual “oasis” that the festival has created for both musicians and listeners over the years, according to John Harbison. In a broader sense, it also speaks to the couple’s relationship to the land where the concerts are held and the inevitable changes both the Harbisons and the propery are facing in the next few years.
The Harbisons, both in their 80s with health concerns, would like the performances to continue into the future, as would the festival’s 11-member board. How and where the performances might continue for the 501(c)(3) enterprise — should either or both of the Harbison’s end their tenure as artistic directors — has been discussed for several years.
Discussions about the fate of the couple’s 110-acre property that backs up against Token Creek have been even more vigorous. Harbison’s acreage is the last privately held land south of Highway 19 located in Dane County’s “green corridor,” stretching northeast of Madison and designed to protect and preserve the area’s last cold-water trout streams. The future of the property is inexorably linked to the future of the concert series.
The Harbisons long ago made their mark as a contemporary classical music power couple. Rose Mary, born and raised on the Token Creek property, is an accomplished classical violinist.
John, a native of Orange, New Jersey, teaches classical and jazz composition at MIT. He won a 1987 Pulitzer Prize for his composition The Flight into Egypt and in 1989 was awarded a $305,000 MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant,” which helped finance the first Token Creek Festival.
The couple’s environmental activities are equally impressive and follow in the footsteps of Rose Mary’s parents, Alice and Dan Pedersen. Unemployed, the Pedersens left Depression-era Chicago in 1933 and with $3,000 in mostly borrowed money bought the farm that is now the Harbisons’ Wisconsin home. The Pedersens eschewed pesticides and herbicides, relied on contour farming to combat erosion, and established the area’s first organic farm.
“My father was a hippie before anyone knew the word, and would quote Keats and Shelley while we were haying in the field,” Rose Mary remembers. “He was less ecological and almost theological, believing in the importance of the land as well as that of the mind and body.”
Preserving the land became one of Rose Mary’s primary passions. In 1936, the state, in its search for income, damned up the Token Creek tributary informally known as Harbison Branch to create a carp pond to feed the East Coast gefilte fish market, an enterprise that ceased in 1956.
The pond and its negative influences on the cold-water spring-fed streams remained until 2015, when the Harbisons spent $130,000 and worked with both the Department of Natural Resources and Inter-Fluve, a Madison firm specializing in stream and river restoration, to reestablish the tributary.
Rose Mary would like to see the property preserved as a single natural parcel. Dane County would like that as well.
“A large contingency of partners is working to preserve the water quality of Token Creek, and the surrounding area is being developed fairly rapidly,” says Darren Marsh, Dane County parks director. “It’s a habitat we’re trying to preserve, and we’re working with people like the Harbisons to make that happen.”
The Harbisons are interested in ceding the land to the public domain. But they’re not sure yet how that will come about.
“They would like us to give it to them,” Rose Mary says of the 75 undeveloped acres the couple is considering transferring to the county to become part of Token Creek County Park. “We’re debating whether that’s a good idea or not.”
Given the price that the county has paid for neighboring properties — $600,000 for a smaller parcel and $1 million for a slightly larger one — such a gift would be impressive. According to assessment records from the town of Burke, the three parcels that make up the Harbison property are together assessed at $566,400.
The Harbisons spend most of their year in Boston due to John’s teaching obligations. Summers were almost always spent in Token Creek, but lately that time has dwindled largely to festival season, says Sarah Schaffer, managing director of the Token Creek Music Festival. Age and health issues have led to inevitable discussions about succession planning.
“The Harbisons want to see the festival continue in perpetuity, and it’s my role to support that,” Schaffer says. The couple will carry on as the concert series’ artistic directors until one or both are unable. Even though John and Rose Mary serve as chair and vice chair, respectively, of the board, they may not have final say in future outcomes.
“The board owns TCF, and there have been moments when they have reminded us of that,” John says.
To further support the festival’s continuation, the Harbisons are withholding the 35 developed acres from any land deal they may make with the county. In addition to the barn, which doubles as the couple’s summer residence, the property includes a caretaker’s house, several outbuildings, and a small structure that serves as John’s music composition studio.
“We want to turn this part of the property into a quasi-public entity, a place for people to meet and have serious conversations,” Rose Mary says.
And if classical music or jazz were to be played during those conversations, so much the better.
