The Aspen Institute’s seminars and conferences, including the Aspen Ideas Festival and the Aspen Music Festival—Aspen, Colo.
When industrial tycoonWalter Paepcke first traveled to Aspen, Colo., in the 1940s, “it was a down-on-its-luck silver- mining town that had been falling apart since the silver bust of the 1890s,” said Todd Breyfogle, Ph.D., director of semi- nars at the Aspen Institute. But that wasn’t what Paepcke saw. To his eye, Aspen’s scenic mountains, deep valley, and lush meadows seemed the ideal place for people—specifi- cally, business leaders—to “retreat and to unite their mind, body, and spirit in a way that an urban setting simply didn’t permit,” Breyfogle said. Aspen’s solitude—Paepcke “intentionally picked a desti-
nation that was ‘removed,’” Breyfogle said—and its beauty seemed to him an ideal backdrop for intellectual stimulation.
In 1949, he organized a 20-day event celebrating the 200th birthday of German poet and philosopher JohannWolfgang von Goethe that brought noted intellectuals, artists, and writ- ers of the day along with international journalists and some 2,000 other attendees to Aspen. With that success behind him, Paepcke founded what is
now the Aspen Institute the following year. Central to the Institute is the Aspen Seminar, where since the 1950s leaders have applied the writings of great thinkers of the past and present to the challenges facing the organizations and com- munities they serve. The Aspen Seminar eventually gave rise to the Aspen Music Festival, the annual International Design Conference, and the Aspen Ideas Festival. More than the other events, the Ideas Festival was built