Arts Activities Support

264 people attended 4 concerts, performed by 15 musicians. Audience feedback showed that the audience enjoyed the performances, and felt closer and more connected to the music through personal contact with musicians. The Artistic Goals of this project, as defined in our narrative were: 1. Present intimate concerts to connect with audiences in meaningful ways. 2. Challenge ourselves with demanding repertoire that is both technically and emotionally satisfying. 3. Expose audiences to significant masterworks of the Baroque era. 4. Promote and educate audiences about Historically Informed Performance. We believe that we achieved these goals. Addressing our 1st goal, we performed our concerts in The Baroque Room, an intimate chamber music space designed acoustically for baroque music. There is seating for 60 people, but it feels full with as few as 20 people in the audience. They are seated on the same plane as we are, and the front row is 5 feet away from the nearest player. This small space allowed us to have a direct connection to the audience with our performances, removing the barrier between performer and listener. We know that this was true for our audience because they would sometimes ask us questions between pieces, and were open in their emotional involvement in the music. Their reactions affected us directly as players, and we responded musically in turn. We felt that we had an exchange with our audience which was very fulfilling emotionally. Addressing our 2nd goal, we certainly challenged ourselves with our choice of repertoire! Concert I was challenging to Marc Levine, our violinist, who played as a soloist alongside his teacher Marc Destrubé. Concert II was programmatically challenging. "A Baroque Christmas" is a program we do every year, but we pick different music. This year included technically challenging music, especially for Tulio Rondón (viola da gamba), such as Marin Marais's La Sonnerie and a Telemann Paris Quartet. This program also included colonial fiddle tunes that Marc Levine (violin) improvised upon. Concert III was especially challenging for Tami Morse (harpsichord). She performed 12 sonatas in 3 days, of some of the most difficult music for harpsichord. It was a marathon for her especially! Concert IV was a challenge to Tulio Rondón (cello), as he played cello sonatas alongside his colleague and our guest Beiliang Zhu. It was a satisfying season for all of us! Addressing our 3rd goal, we exposed our audience to Baroque standards such as the JS Bach double violin concerto, the JS Bach f minor harpsichord concerto, and music by JS Bach that one might not necessarily hear, such as all the violin and gamba sonatas in 3 days. We programmed music by lesser known composers such as Avison, Muffat, Becker, and Barrière. Addressing our 4th goal, we spoke at every concert about historical performance practice, our instruments, and the repertoire. The greatest challenge we all had was learning so much music at a high level. Three back-to-back days of Bach sonatas, for example, was extremely difficult, since all 12 needed to be learned and maintained at the same time. In the future, we would spread a project like this out over the season. We successfully reached our intended community of musicians and audience members. Our audience was diverse in that there was a wide range of ages attending, including children and grandparents. Our ticket prices are not too high ($20 adult/$15 senior and student), and we made an effort to give out complimentary tickets to people we know that would not be able to attend otherwise. In terms of ethnic diversity, there were Chinese and Canadian musicians, and two of our core members are Venezuelan and mixed-race Japanese American. Approximately 10% of our audience was made up of minority ethnicities. As a group, we have discussed how to have a more diverse audience. We are thinking about a number of solutions such as performing in different locations and handing out comp tickets to minority communities. Next season we are MPR class notes artists, and will be performing for mostly elementary-aged children. We are happy that we will be exposing younger people to baroque music, and hope to encourage the most enthusiastic to attend our concerts in the future. Our concerts were all open to the public and handicapped accessible. Our flexible seating allowed us to put people in wheelchairs right up front, or on the end of a row. We made an extra effort to make everyone in our audience comfortable, and they seemed to appreciate it. All in all, we served the community that we expected we would, and are brainstorming about how to expand that community to be more diverse in the future.