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! The Rotary Club of Medicine Hat is the oldest service club in our city, forming in 1918, about a decade after Medicine Hat was incorporated. As the major project for the Rotary Club, the last 7 decades have seen thousands of volunteer hours as well as tens of thousands of dollars from the Rotary Club members, and 2026 marks the 71st Festival of their sponsorship! We are very grateful for this continued support of such an important community arts program for our youth.

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. Under the auspices of the Alberta Music Festival Association, we are one of 37 local festivals in the province and operate as the 4th largest, seeing upwards of 1000 participants each year and many more audience members. 

Scholarships for participants are sponsored by private individuals and are self-sustaining. Donations can be made through the Medicine Hat Rotary Music Festival Society, which was incorporated as a non profit by the Rotary Club in 1998. Our 2026 Festival will be held at two local downtown churches, to whom we extend our deepest gratitude for hosting us this year.