Accepted by Kickstarter

We've officially had our project accepted by Kickstarter! The next step is to create a video about the project, finalize our pledge levels, and post everything on their page. We will "go live" Dec 15th and can't wait to get this project going!

Fundraiser Kickoff Concert

We are very excited to announce our fundraiser kickoff concert!

Sunday Dec. 19th @ 2pm (doors open at 1:30pm)
26 North Street, Plymouth, MA
Dr. Brian Whitfield's music salon, entrance through side door
suggested $10 donation

Program:
Lori Laitman: I Never Saw Another Butterfly, soprano and saxophone
Kevin Clark: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, for solo saxophone
Judith Weir: King Harald's Saga, for solo soprano
Jason Belcher: Continuous Cities 2 and Lavender and the Newt, soprano and saxophone

Dr. Whitfield was nice enough to offer us his beautiful music salon for our kickoff concert. We will be performing duo and solo pieces in what is sure to be a wonderful afternoon concert. Starting Dec 15th we will be fundraising through Kickstarter, the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. There will unique rewards for pledges, so stay tuned!

Photo Shoot

A few weeks ago Elisabeth and I spent a Sunday afternoon in Central Park taking press photos for the project. It was great weather for October so there were plenty of people at the park. We drew a lot of attention (formal attire and a saxophone will do that) and it was funny have strangers taking our photo as we posed for our own photographer. At one point a little girl ran around a corner, saw us (or more precisely Elisabeth in her gown), stopped suddenly, and said "wwwoooooowwww". Haha.

Here's a few of my favorite photos from the day:

Emerging Voices Project

Hey everyone!

Elisabeth and I created this blog to share each step of our Emerging Voices Project. I thought I would kick things off with the story of how we got started:

I moved to NYC over a year ago and Elisabeth, who was already living here, asked me if I wanted to do more duo work with her. We had performed two pieces by Lori Laitman ("I Never Saw Another Butterfly" and "Living in the Body") while studying at the Peabody Conservatory and performing in our experimental chamber group No Signal. Elisabeth and I quickly decided to commission a few pieces, throw in one of Laitman's works, and make a CD.

After months of off and on planning we decided to get serious and set a deadline of Summer 2011. We needed to choose a theme to tie everything together and inspire the composers. Elisabeth really took lead here and suggested using Laitman's "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" as a starting off point. The texts (and title) used in this piece come from a collection of art and poetry under the same name, written by Jewish children who lived in the concentration camp Theresienstadt. We decided to ask the composers to write music based on the themes of loss of innocence and childhood.

Now we needed to pick out the composers to commission. We limited ourselves to 3 composers so that all of the music would fit on one CD and we'd have a reasonable budget. It was hard to narrow it down to just three (believe me there's plenty of composers we wanted to include, in fact if we raise more money I'd like to add on a few "bonus" composers). In the end we asked Kathleen Bader, George Lam, and Adam Knauss if they would write for us. They all said yes and we were starting to get really excited about the project!

Since then we have been getting ready to kickoff a fundraising drive for the project. We struggled with project names for a few weeks, including a few awful ideas, before settling on the Emerging Voices Project. We spent a Sunday afternoon in Central Park taking press photos. We booked a kickoff concert in Plymouth, MA on December 19th (full details in another post). We're planning a masterclass on contemporary music at Duxbury High School (my home town!). And we hope to get the project on Kickstarter in December.

Ok that's plenty for one post. If you read all the way through you get a special badge!