Performer Profiles: A Series (and a breeding ground for crazy schemes)

This is a pretty picture of a euphonium

This blog got me a paid gig within 10 days of my first post.

Marketing my performances wasn't even really my goal in starting to write here--nicest darn surprise I've gotten in years. My mom and I have retooled our Polish-American program to include more Chopin, more Gershwin, and more music that's personal and specific to our family history. It's now called Songs Our Mothers Taught Us, and we'll be bringing it to several venues in Poland and to the Halle Cultural Arts Center in Apex during the 2014-2015 season. Hurray!

I'm hoping it can get you one, too. (more after the jump)

I'll continue to use this space to talk about my own performance projects, but as you know, I'm even more excited about using it to help build a richer, bigger, more vibrant musical community in Raleigh. (And Durham. And Chapel Hill. You know.)

My series of composer interviews (new one coming later this week) sort of grew organically out of my coverage of this yMusic concert of pieces by Duke composers. Conducting these interviews has been a fascinating blast and it seems like y'all like them too. Now I want to do a series of performer interviews, too--but this time I have dark ulterior motives (see boldface type above).

Triangle-area classical musicians are the nicest bunch I know, but we've been taught to to expect that we'll find opportunities by competing with each other rather than create them by collaborating. We look to institutions to extend opportunities to us--and our classical music institutions in Raleigh are amazing, but tend to outsource the really exciting stuff to New York--instead of thinking about what we would like to do and how we can make it happen. We have the idea that if we're music producers, then we shouldn't also be music consumers, We don't take as much joy in each other's work as we could, and it walls us off from a million ways our own music could be enriched.

But I'm hoping that this blog can help people form new creative partnerships, originate their own performances (and new kinds of performances), and feel empowered to make their own projects happen. I'm not just planning to publish interviews with local classical soloists and get pageviews here as their friends and family click through from facebook. My hope is that YOU--you lovely Triangle classical musician, you--will read a profile of a clarinetist with some gorgeous audio clips just as you listen to your favorite chamber piece (for your instrument and clarinet) for the 2938573th time. Or you'll see a mention of a hipster coffee shop that's interested in presenting live classical music to its patrons on Wednesdays and be like, "WHOA that's the place next door."

If you're a classically-trained musician doing some professional work in the Triangle (whether it's classical or -ish) and you'd like your work publicized here, get in touch. I'd love to take you for coffee and write you up.

If you sing or play a "portable" instrument and you're interested in performing in a chamber music project some of us are putting together for the late summer, let me know.

And have a super week.