The 5th Annual Quartz Mountain Music Festival will expand this year to two July weekends of performances and will offer a Chamber Music Academy and an Orchestral Academy in addition to the Celedonio Romeros Guitar Academy, established in 2009 by the internationally acclaimed Romero Guitar Quartet.

David Palmer, concert pianist and director of Chamber Music Amarillo, originated the QMMF and serves as the festival’s executive/artistic director. Palmer and the QMMF Board of Directors plan to continue giving pre-professional age students opportunities to study with world-class professional musicians in the three academies and also to establish future academies in conducting, vocal arts and jazz in communities surrounding Quartz Mountain.

“We look forward to eventually providing four professional concerts during two consecutive weekends with the major orchestral concert—a combination of students and faculty—taking place towards the end of the festival. During the week between concerts, the students will attend the academies, study and perform; and a select group of students will have an opportunity to perform during the final day of the festival,” Palmer said.

“Los Romeros and Friends” (Romero Guitar Quartet) will kick off the festival with a guitar quartet performance at 7 p.m. Saturday, July 24 at Western Oklahoma State College’s Herschal H. Crow Fine Arts Center in Altus, Okla. The Quartz Mountain Music Festival Chamber Players will perform at 7 p.m. Friday, July 30 and the Quartz Mountain Music Festival Orchestra at 7 p.m. Saturday, July 31, both at the Robert. M. Kerr Performing Arts Center at Quartz Mountain State Park.

Tickets for each performance sell for $28 in advance, $33 at the box office and $15 for students with identification, tax included; credit card purchases are accepted. To purchase tickets, call the Altus Chamber of Commerce at 580-482-0210; for more information, call 580-649-7596 or visit the festival website at www.qmmf.org.

Michael Palmer, director of orchestral studies at Atlanta’s Georgia State University and director of the annual Bellingham Festival of Music in Bellingham, Wash., will head the Orchestral Academy at Western Oklahoma State College. Palmer will make his fifth appearance as conductor of the QMMF Orchestra. Violinist, teacher and performer, Annie Chalex Boyle of Traverse City, Mich., will lead the QMMF Chamber Music Academy, also scheduled at WOSC, where students will study and perform throughout the week. The Romero Guitar Quartet will return to Southwest Oklahoma to teach the Guitar Academy at Granite and Camp Kate Portwood. During the festival week, in conjunction with the academy, the Oklahoma Outback Arts Association will sponsor the 2010 Oklahoma Outback Art Festival, a judged art show and sale; for more information, call 580-535-2184 or 580-782-2444.

Ben Bailey of Altus, vice chairman of the QMMF Board of Directors, holds the job of writing grant proposals to secure financial support for the festival. Other funding comes from the board of directors, Friends of the Festival, ticket sales and student tuition. Friends of the Festival may sponsor the festival on different levels (platinum, gold and silver) and receive tickets to the performances, preferred seating and other amenities. For more information, call 580-649-7596. Music supporters across the United States are raising tuition funds to send promising students to the academies.

“Tickets are not going to cover the cost of the festival and academies, no matter what we do; but the idea is that ultimately we will make enough from the tickets to cover a large part of the support,” Bailey said.

“We have this absolutely fantastic performance hall, and just having Quartz Mountain is amazing; you’re driving around through flat cotton fields, then all of a sudden you have the mountain beauty and the lake that you normally travel to Colorado to see. An overriding vision of Mary Frates (current QMMF board president and founder of the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute at Quartz--held annually in June for high school students) is for Quartz Mountain to become a center of the arts in Southwest Oklahoma.”