Summer festival honors Iron Range nurturing

This story begins more than a century ago, long before Aurora’s Veda Zuponcic was born. Even before her parents were born.

And it continues, changing yet retaining its core values.

For Zuponcic, it means the Northern Lights Music Festival. Consider it her “thank you” to the Range. She’s giving back because she can’t imagine her success happening without the Range and what it gave to her.

This year it opens July 1 in Aurora and closes July 21 in Virginia. The Festival has grown to include orchestra concerts, chamber music, and an opera. Participants are not only students and faculty but also internationally-known performers. Events that include kids’ concerts and after-opera celebrations are presented throughout the Range—in Aurora, Gilbert, Virginia, Chisholm, Hibbing, Buhl, Ely, Tower, Makinen and Duluth.

Zuponcic said it started in the early 1900s with the mines and their need for miners. It led to a flood of immigrants—of more than 40 different nationalities—who came to do the work. Among them, her grandfathers. And her grandmothers. From Slovenia.

“They came over poor as church mice, worked tremendously hard, and wanted their children to have a good education,” Zuponcic said. “The mining companies were making so much money. By 1910 everybody was building schools because of this gigantic immigrant population.”

The town, she said, was miserable. “But they walked into a palace that was the school. You name the subject, there were superb teachers. They were paid almost double than anyone else in the country.”

And the children—the first generation to be born in America—thrived. That generation included Herman Zuponcic and Helen Bradach Zuponcic. They were Veda Zuponcic’s parents.

“The schools were unbelievable.” Zuponcic said. In academics, sports, the arts. Every primary grade classroom had a piano. So did the high school’s model apartment.

“My mother liked nice things,” Zuponcic continued. The model apartment showcased nice things. The girls learned how to iron linens, set a table, make a bed, lay a fire; the intention was that girls who stopped school after 8th grade could go to the city to work for rich families.

“My mother had no intention of working for someone else, but she wanted everything in that room. Including the piano.”

Zuponcic’s mother graduated from high school, then went to work for the railroad company as a telephone operator.

“Then she met my father,” Zuponcic said. “He’d been an honor student in high school and went to college for one year. Then came the Depression. There was no father in the picture anymore, so he helped support the family. That’s the way life was.”

He was entrepreneurial. He bought a movie theater. They got married and lived above the theater with their growing family—eventually there were five children. And then the theater burned down. “They lost everything. The building was underinsured.”

But they persevered. “They had a superb high school education. They were sophisticated in their own way.”

Which explains Zuponcic’s stance. “The reason I’m so passionate about all this is because it came from the public schools,” she said.

And always, there was her mother’s wish to live like a lady. She had beautiful silver and beautiful china, purchased one piece at a time. And she had a Steinway.

At first Veda took lessons from her mother. And then, from an expert. The little girl would go to Virginia for lessons. At first, she and her mother would ride the local bus. But then, beginning in second grade, Veda would go alone.

Once a week she’d miss school in the afternoon. “I would get on the bus and sit right behind the driver,” she said. “When my lesson was done, I’d walk to my aunt’s house in Virginia and then take the 5 p.m. bus back to Aurora.”

The passengers, mostly women who worked at the shirt factory, would look out for her. But she remembers most fondly the drivers, Andy Leviska and Ottes Sharp.

That little girl had not only an interest in but also an aptitude for the piano. Days after graduating from Aurora-Hoyt Lakes High School in 1964, she traveled, alone, to Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. She earned a bachelor’s degree in three years, then a master’s, in piano performance. She went on to a teaching career at southern New Jersey’s Glassboro College. It’s now Rowan University. She’s been a faculty member for 53 years. “I didn’t stop participating and developing,” she said.

In 1967 President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin met in Glassboro for a summit meeting. In Hollybush mansion, the university president’s home.

In 1983 Zuponcic created the Hollybush Festival. In 1987, the 20th anniversary of summit, she added a music competition, for American and Soviet composers. It was a success. It led to multiple visits to the Soviet Union for her.

But in all the years since graduating from A-HL, Zuponcic had always returned to Aurora to visit her family. In 2001 she was asked to do a concert for the town’s centennial. She thought no one would attend because no one would be interested.

“But much to my great surprise, hundreds of people were there,” she said.

At the time Zuponcic was running a summer music camp at her New Jersey college. She thought about bringing her students to the Range. “It’s a nice place in the summer. Kids will like being here.’”

So she did. That summer music camp became the Northern Lights Music Festival in 2004. It’s more professional now but still offers opportunities for young musicians that include free lessons for local youngsters. “All you have to do is ask,” Zuponcic said.

When Zuponcic did that concert for Aurora’s centennial, she did a solo version of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” The orchestral version will be presented this summer, on the 4th of July in Aurora, with Zuponcic as piano soloist and her son, Gavriel Heine, as conductor.

She continued: “If you stick with us, you’ll get to see some of the nicest buildings on the Iron Range. We get a wide range of professions (in audience members). An electrician and a miner and a lawyer and a doctor, all sitting next to each other. It gives me so much joy.”

And for all of it, throughout her life, Zuponcic has credited her upbringing on the Iron Range. But her gratitude is accompanied by concern. She’s especially determined about helping now, with school music programs waning.

“I do all this because artists need places to do their work,” she said. “It’s a responsibility of those of us who are in a position to help, to help.”