What is the Medicine Hat Rotary Music Festival?
Each year, we look forward to hearing the performances of all our participants, young and old! We welcome adjudicators, teachers, parents, and community audience members each year, all of who play a very important role in furthering the love of music and the wonderful benefits it brings in the lives of our young people.  We thank them for their dedication to encouraging the youth in our community to enjoy and participate in the arts. As a "Festival", we are primarily focused on bringing joy and inspiration, along with the educational component, promoting a greater appreciation for music and the arts in the lives of those in our community, as well as “pacing each other on the road to excellence”. The Medicine Hat Rotary Music Festival has been the major community project for the Rotary Club of Medicine Hat since 1955, and is currently in transition to sponsorship by the Medicine Hat Music Festival Society. 

The Medicine Hat Rotary Music Festival is a local festival for participants who live within 100 km of Medicine Hat, Alberta (with exceptions for rural communities falling within 50km of this boundary).  Local community festivals are the grassroots of a three-tiered music festival movement in Canada. The Medicine Hat Rotary Music Festival offers classes in:  Vocal / Piano / Brass / Woodwind / Orchestra / Guitar / Choral / Cello / Chamber / Orchestra / Speech / Choral Speech / Musical Theatre / Violin & Viola / Music Composition / Band (Workshop). Our Festival runs over a 2-week period each March. Our Festival is designed to provide a stage for our dedicated young musicians and speech artists to have the opportunity to perform for an audience of their family, friends, and community, while receiving valuable feedback from an expert teacher within their discipline. The Festival engages highly qualified adjudicators and educators who offer feedback on each performance. Our adjudicators are hand selected based on their reputations of being inspiring teachers, who will offer encouragement and opportunity for learning in a positive and constructive manner. We have been so lucky to have many wonderful teachers come to work with our young community artists and our audiences and teachers are inspired by them as well! Our young artists work very hard all year on their pieces and having a place to perform is essential. Our participants have ranged from age 3 up to 81 in past years! Although we do base most of our classes on the Alberta Music Festival Association's syllabus, we will also create a special class for you if you don't see a class that your performance could fit into. As such, we offer many classes for Adults, in all disciplines, as well as special guitar classes. 

The Medicine Hat Rotary Club sponsors over one-third of the total budget and fund-raises for another third. Scholarships for participants are sponsored by private individuals and are self-sustaining. Held at the Medicine Hat College, and local churches, the Festival is not under the auspices of the College - rather we rent space there for the duration of the 2-week Festival. 

We would like to make special mention of our donors, who generously offer financial support so that we can run the Festival each year. Thank you to: