Percussionist Keith Aleo remembers being a camper in the summer of 1980 and pleading with his parents to let him attend the Arts Academy in the fall. "They didn't take me seriously at first... until they came to camp and heard me play with WYSO. And then they understood."

After graduating from the Academy, Keith served on the summer faculty at Interlochen and held a position in the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra. He remains active in the orchestral world and appears occasionally with the Boston and Chicago symphony orchestras.

Keith Aleo

In 2003, after the Florida Philharmonic filed for bankruptcy, Keith found a position with the Avedis Zildjian Company, the highly regarded maker of cymbals. As Director of Education and Orchestral Activities, Keith has many responsibilities - but one of his favorite jobs is overseeing a scholarship program that will give other young percussionists the same opportunities he had.

Each year, Zildjian works with 20 of the top music programs in three different countries to provide scholarships to promising musicians, including one Interlochen camper and one Academy student.

"I definitely enjoy working for a company that has such a strong commitment to education - and it’s wonderful that Interlochen students are beneficiaries of that," Keith said. The company also allows him to continue teaching during the summer at Interlochen.

Zildjian has also supported Interlochen through donations of cymbals. "They have been very generous," said John Alfieri, percussion instructor at the Academy. "It has really given us a world-class collection of cymbals; Our kids get to play on the best of the best."

With a company history that spans 383 years, it seems natural that Zildjian would be committed to training and inspiring new generations of musicians. "It is really amazing; My boss, Craigie Zildjian, is the fourteenth generation of her family to run the business," Keith noted.

The company began in 1618, when Avedis I, an alchemist, inadvertently created an alloy with surprisingly good sound qualities that he soon used to create cymbals. With the blessings of Sultan Murad IV, he started the family business in 1623 near Constantinople and was given the surname Zildjian, which means "son of cymbal maker" in Armenian.

Three centuries later, Avedis Zildjian III, who had immigrated to America, agreed to take over the family business and the company moved to Quincy, Massachusetts. Over the next decades, Avedis and his family worked closely with artists like Gene Kruppa and Tommy Thompson of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to develop new sounds, shaping all styles and genres of music to the present.

Today, Craigie Zildjian carries on the family tradition of making instruments and partnering with musicians. The company has been officially recognized as the oldest continually family-owned business in the country.