John Trudeau

Who was John Trudeau?

S. John Trudeau was an American musician who expanded the music department at Portland State University and helped co-found the outdoor Britt Festival of performing arts in Jacksonville, Oregon, the first of its kind in the Pacific Northwest.

In 1951, Trudeau came to Portland, Oregon to join the Oregon Symphony as its principal trombone player. Trudeau first came to Southern Oregon in 1955 with the Portland Symphonic Brass Ensemble for a performance at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, whose founder suggested the creation of a classical musical festival in the area. Trudeau began a search, hoping to find an area that would be like Tanglewood in Massachusetts, home of the Tanglewood Music Festival.

Together with Sam McKinney they established the Britt Festival in 1963 as a two-week long celebration of music in Jacksonville, described by The Oregonian as "a picturesque former gold-mining town in southern Oregon". The two had been searching for a site and found it in an area that had been homesteaded by Peter Britt in the 1850s, and recognized that the site's natural acoustics made it appropriate for outdoor performances.