The U.S. Secretary of State will be standing on a different kind of stage this summer, but not one that she’s altogether unused to.
Condoleezza Rice has been confirmed as the featured guest for the Aspen Institute and Aspen Music Festival’s Words and Music event on Aug. 2 in the Benedict Music Tent.
Rice will be in conversation with Aspen Institute CEO Walter Isaacson, although topics of discussion have not been announced. A former piano student who spent a summer at the Aspen Music Festival and School, Rice will play a Dvorak piano quintet, accompanied by current students.
Rice has publicly spoken about her time at the music festival, and in more than one media account credited her experience at the school for making her switch her career path to the one that led her to her current position.
At a Peace Corps conference in April, she told an audience how she “met 11-year-olds who could play from sight what it had taken me all year to learn. And I thought, OK, I’m about to end up at Nordstrom playing, or maybe a piano bar someplace. But, you know, not Carnegie Hall.”
Rice went back and told her parents she wanted to change her major, but she wasn’t sure what she wanted to change her major to. They reacted, she recounted, by pointing out that it was their money that was going to her education, “and then we had the, you know, ‘Well, you’re going to end up a waitress at a Howard Johnson’s — you don’t know what you’re going to do with your life.’”
Rice then took a class in international politics taught by Josef Korbel, Madeleine Albright’s father, which led to her specializing in the Soviet Union, and the rest is history.
The Aspen Institute has asked Rice to come to Aspen on various other occasions which haven’t panned out, said Institute spokesman Jim Spiegelman. Long before she was Secretary of State, however, Rice did come as a Soviet Union expert as part of the Institute’s Aspen Strategy Group.
“We’re always happy to have alumni back,” said festival spokeswoman Janice Szabo. “We have classical music alumni and political alumni.”
Previous Words and Music events have featured Senator and presidential candidate John McCain and Grammy-award-winning opera singer Jessye Norman in 2007.
Rice’s appearance is scheduled for 3 p.m. on Aug. 2.
