• MISSION AND HISTORY•

Mission

Providing Northeast Wisconsin with diverse opportunities for the creation and enjoyment of music at a high level.

History

In the Spring of 2009, University of Wisconsin Green Bay students Michael Lund Ziegler and Timothy Kiefer desired to give a recital together but were unable to secure a formal recital space. Instead of a Lund Ziegler/Kiefer recital, the two put together a two-hour event at the university coffeehouse that featured music and musicians of all types and backgrounds. Baroque music was played alongside electronic music; high school students performed alongside college professors. The event was aptly titled “Music for the Sake of Music” (MFSOM). Since then, similar coffeehouse events have taken place regularly. These have appeared as Music for the Sake of Music’s “Opuses.”  Two years later, Music of the Sake of Music began teaching students and rehearsing ensembles which would later be merged together into the MFSOM Summer Music Festival.

​The MFSOM lessons and ensembles began as separately conceived ideas in the summer of 2011. The first MFSOM ensemble was a small, 20-something piece string orchestra consisting of mostly high school students that met weekly throughout the summer before playing a few short pieces as a part of a MFSOM Opus. The members of that group challenged founding director Michael Lund Ziegler to expand it to a symphony orchestra the following summer. Since that expansion, the ensembles have multiplied and the format has evolved into six rehearsals over two weeks. A performance that was but an element in a larger production in 2011 was two stand-alone concerts in 2017. The make-up of the ensemble(s) has also evolved. What was mostly high school students is now mostly adult community members and features amateurs alongside professionals and few talented students.

The original lesson program (now: Community Program) began in the summer of 2011 as a mechanism to address the challenges of starting students in a large ensemble setting. Each instrument is unique to itself, and for students to reach their true potential, require individualized instruction that a classroom band or orchestra teacher simply cannot provide during class time. 20-something beginning students took advantage of the program in its first year. With additional space available, lessons were made available to non-beginning students as well. That first year saw 56 total lesson students, about a third of which were beginning students. The program has since grown to teach more than 170 students each year.

In 2018, the Collegiate String Program was introduced through a residency presented by the Collegiate Program teaching artists. The 2019 season will see the first collegiate string program in its entirety.