NEW GLOUCESTER — The seventh annual Maine Festival of American Music will be held June 27-30 at the historic 1794 Shaker Meeting House.

Key festival participants are the Portland String Quartet, Maine State Historian Earle Shettleworth Jr., Brother Arnold Hadd, master fiddler Gregory Boardman, pianist Virginia Eskin and violinist Dean Stein.

This year’s theme, “Discovery in Sound: Bringing Music to Life through Scholars and Performers,” is a testament to the PSQ’s vision, planning and research skills.

Each concert in the 2012 festival demonstrates how scholarship informs performance, said violist Julia Adams, a member of the PSQ along with Paul Ross, Steve Kecskemethy and Ronald Lantz.

A perfect example of that is the “The Athens of the North: Music Art and Architecture in Mid-19th Century Portland” concert, featuring John Knowles Paine’s 1855 String Quartet in D Major, Opus 5.

The manuscript score of the string quartet by Paine, a Portland native and founder of the Harvard University Department of Music, was made available to the PSQ by Harvard’s Houghton Library. The piece was premiered by the quartet in 2011.

The PSQ and Stein will perform Paine’s composition during the 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 27, program, which also features a power point presentation by Shettleworth of what Portland was like during the mid-19th century.

For more than 42 years, the close-knit PSQ has traveled the world, performing, recording and teaching. It is now embracing change with the onset of violinist Kecskemethy’s illness, drawing on the talents of esteemed colleagues and young professionals.

The PSQ, which has a close relationship with the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community, plans the program, said Shaker Museum Director Leonard Brooks.  “They know classical music intimately and know how to make connection to the whole world of music.”

“The Shakers and the quartet have talked for years about doing something in the summer. We’re absolutely delighted it is the seventh year,” Brooks said.

The festival’s Thursday, June 28, program, “In the Shaker Tradition: Shaker Quick Dance the Fiddle Tunes,” will feature Hadd and Boardman, who will explore the connections between Shaker quick dance and American fiddling.

This will be the debut performance of Boardman’s Fiddle Quartet.

During workshop day on Friday, June 29, music students and amateur players from all over New England and beyond will gather at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village to rehearse and perform movements from the American chamber music repertoire. A master class will be held from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. in the Meeting House. (Admission: $60 for workshop; free to the master class only).

The final concert, at 7 p.m. Saturday, June 30, is titled “Out of the Box! – Women Composers Break Barriers with Masterpieces.” Eskin, an expert on American women composers, will lecture and perform Amy Beach’s Piano Quintet with the PSQ and Stein.

The Shaker Community in New Gloucester was founded in 1783 by Shaker missionaries and became a formal community through mutual covenant in 1794.

The New Gloucester site continues to this day as an active community of Shakers, conducting educational outreach programs and operating the Shaker Museum and Shaker Library, which houses the second largest Shaker collection in the country.

Concert tickets are $25/$20 for seniors; children under 21 admitted free. Checks should be make out to the United Society of Shakers, 707 Shaker Road, New Gloucester, ME 04260. Tickets may also be purchased online at www.shaker.lib.me.us/maine_festival.html. For more information, call 926-4597 or email usshakers@aol.com. 

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