Arts Activities Support

75% of all tickets vouchers, vouchers were given to season ticket holders, were used during the concert season for 3 different concerts between February and April 2017. Season tickets sold during the season were 206. One of our artistic goals have been to perform diverse repertoire from concert to concert within a season to better serve the varying tastes of our community. Our three concert series this season included our traditional Christmas touching on styles of traditional music from various cultures around the world, a February concert exploring the masterwork collection of eleven Zigeunerlieder (Gipsy songs) by Brahms which was a significant challenge, and an April concert series featuring small group performs and the entire chorale performing songs by Billy Joel, Miley Cyrus, Franz Joseph Haydn, Steven Sondheim, etc. Another of our goals was to seek new artistic challenges. The most prevalent example of this during the season was the performance and rehearsal of Brahms Zigeunerlieder for the February concert in our season. The piece required great vocal flexibility from the singers as well as wide vocal ranges, not to mention the entire work was performed in German. Many of our singers have sung in German but the amount of not repeating German text presented a very significant challenge more so than was anticipated. The performance of the Zigeunerlieder would have benefited from both additional rehearsal time and better preparation from some of the singers. Another of our goals were to keep our concerts affordable and accessible which we did achieve with the addition of student/senior price tickets and a new ticket voucher program which was very successful, 3/4 of all vouchers used by the end of the season. Our organization served the community we had intended and had expected. They are the demographic age between young adult, 25yr old, and the elderly, 65+. Of those two defined age definitions our audience is a little stronger in the elderly demographic. In our local community and surrounding counties cultivating a diverse audience is difficult. This season in an attempt to broaden our audience diversity we implemented 2 new strategies: discount tickets for seniors and students, and new ticket vouchers for season ticket holders. Ticket vouchers were very successful with 3/4 of all vouchers being utilized by the end of the season. We also saw a small uptick in the number of student tickets purchased. We still feel there could be additional avenues for increasing community diversity within our audience. We will be examining what to do differently in the future to broaden our community diversity but at this time we have yet to have that discussion.