Without a clear path to the future, Hidden Valley explores Oberlin partnership.

By his own admission, Peter Meckel is not a musician, other than singing in the shower. “I am not a musician but I am a good musical administrator,” he says. “I see what combinations are going to work.”

He has been finding combinations – of instruments, of groups, of students and teachers – for 62 years. He is the founding director of Hidden Valley Music Seminars, a nonprofit that began in 1963 in Southern California to provide summer programs to high school music students. The organization moved to Monterey County where it operated out of high school campuses for a few years, before settling on a beautiful campus in Carmel Valley in 1971. “We have been here ever since and we love it,” Meckel says. “This is my life’s work.”

At 84, the founding director remains the organization’s only executive director, although since at least 2016, he has accepted nominal or no compensation for his work. Meckel says it’s time to come up with a succession plan, but finding the next director has been challenging. He searched for a replacement, but board members worried the candidates could not fill his shoes. So Meckel was left wondering what to do.

“One night I just woke up and thought: Maybe we’re making a mistake, maybe instead of looking for an individual we should look for an institution that would stand for the things we stand for,” he says.

So he turned to an institution that already has a relationship with Hidden Valley, and began talking with representatives of Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio. Oberlin is unique – it is the only major music school in the country that shares a campus with a liberal arts college, offering a dual-degree program in five years. Their faculty and students regularly visit Hidden Valley; for example, in January, Oberlin at Hidden Valley featured a public performance by the Verona Quartet, the Oberlin quartet-in-residence, which led a chamber music intensive.

“We have greatly enjoyed our partnership with Hidden Valley… it’s a storied venue and one where our students and faculty have enjoyed performing,” Andrea Simakis, Oberlin’s director of media relations, says via email. “We are exploring possibilities for future arrangements between our two organizations.”

Both Simakis and Meckel emphasize there is no agreement yet, nor a timeline for a possible decision on whether to move forward, just a conversation about a potential future agreement.