The Pine Mountain Music Festival (PMMF) was founded in Iron Mountain, Michigan in 1991 by Laura Deming, a cellist and member of the orchestra of Lyric Opera of Chicago. She invited several colleagues from Chicago to present a week-long chamber music series, and by the second year the programming broadened to include opera, eventually expanding geographically into other communities, each roughly 100 miles apart. The series has grown from five or six events in one city to more than 40 performances, workshops and master classes held in various combinations in the areas surrounding Houghton, Marquette, and Iron Mountain, with limited appearances in Escanaba, Munising, and Land O' Lakes, WI. Today, the Pine Mountain Music Festival continues as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that produces and tours professional-quality opera, symphony, and chamber music. The PMMF maintains an annual run from mid-June to mid-July with a rotating venue in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and parts of Northeast Wisconsin.

Among its significant achievements since its founding, the PMMF has earned the Governor’s Awards for Arts and Culture (1998), the first National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) direct grant ever awarded in the Upper Peninsula for its commission of The Children of the Keweenaw (2001), and was a recipient of the Great Lakes Community Arts Award from the Michigan Association of Community Arts Agencies (2003).

During its 2011 season, the Pine Mountain Music Festival performed an original opera titled “Rockland,” inspired by an altercation between a group of striking Finnish miners and sheriff’s deputies in Rockland, Ontonagon County and based on an account written by Alfred Laakso, one of the miners. The opera’s “Old World Premiere” took place in Nivala, Finland in June 2011, thanks to a collaborative effort between PMMF and the Jokilaakso Music Foundation. It’s “New World Premiere” took place at the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts in Houghton on July 15 and 17, 2011.

The Pine Mountain Music Festival commissioned an original opera for its 10th season in 2001. Titled The Children of the Keweenaw, the opera focused with original music by Paul Seitz, libretto by Kathleen Masterson. The opera was supported by a $25,000 Creation and Presentation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs, the D&N Bank, and other private and public sources. The completed opera premiered on July 11, 2001 at the Calumet Theatre in Calumet, Michigan.