Atz Kilcher

A Multimedia Journey: "When You Dream"
Music in the Wilderness with Atz Kilcher

A refreshingly touching and personal story of a young Swiss immigrant couple’s dream to leave pre-WWII Europe, and raise a family in the natural beauty and inspiring wilderness near Homer Alaska, in the late 1930’s.

Through his multi media concert, Atz Kilcher will take you back to that log cabin where he and his seven siblings were raised, where music, creativity, and artistic expression were instilled to be as fundamental as learning to live off the land.

Let Atz Kilcher weave his story into your life.

“Music wasn’t just something we did in our free time, it was as natural as breathing, we breathed music as we hunted and gathered, planted and harvested, worked and played. That breath of creativity which my parents blessed us with now lives on, not only in my generation, but in the third and even the fourth, most notably in the music and acting of my daughter Jewel, and my great niece Q’orianka. It simply amazes me, and always will!”

—Atz Kilcher

You will see old 16mm color footage of the Kilcher family homesteading and living a subsistence lifestyle, surrounded only by natures beauty. In the summer we traveled the beach at low tide, to get to Homer fifteen miles away.

This is one of the slides Atz uses as a back drop to his song, "Forever in my Mind," a song about his childhood cabin. Here he is in the dog house again, in front of the old 'fox farmers' cabin, were his parents lived while they build the log house to prove up on their homestead.

In those early days you could shoot a big bull moose not too far from your cabin. Moose meat was a main stay. Atz grew up thinking that everybody ate moose steak for breakfast. In the days before electricity, they left it hanging in the shed to keep it frozen, in the summer, they smoked and canned it.

When you are homesteading, everyone has to help out. Summers are short but days are long. Even so, they were never quite long enough to get everything done before the winter snows.

In the winter they traveled across the frozen swamps and through the forest to get to town. Atz's dad built a trail with a hand axe and a cross cut saw.

"Woodland Rockabye" is a song Atz wrote as a tribute to his mother for instilling her love of music in him.
"She sang to me when I was a baby being carried on her back, through the meadows and forests, in an old military rucksack. Once when I asked her she told me that she had even started singing to me long before I was born."

—Atz Kilcher

Through this delightful multi media story, you will come to understand the power and far reaching effects of music and the arts in the wilderness, as well as holding fast to a simple dream.