Current Activities

ACCESS TO MUSIC

Community Residencies & Partnerships

In 2008, Access to Music entered its fourth year in partnership with the YM & YWHA of Washington Heights and Inwood. This community based organization offers a wide variety of programming for people of all ages, and has a goal to make their facility a center for arts activity, providing cultural opportunities that are presently unavailable to the surrounding area. Our Phoenix Ensemble has performed three seasons of chamber music concerts at their Rabinowitz Auditorium, and we also have worked closely with their Senior Center, presenting opera and music appreciation classes. Arts organizations across the country are facing the challenge of finding the appropriate methods to bring the arts to the “baby-boomer” generation, and Ansonia Music Outreach and the Y of Washington Heights worked on a new project in 2008 designed to create artistic programming specifically for this age group.

In January of 2008 we began a partnership with the Sirovich Community Center located in the East Village of Manhattan. This facility serves a diverse New York City community in need of quality cultural offerings. We are offering opera appreciation classes and a season of four concerts at Sirovich, and intend to work with them to offer further programming that will fit the particular needs of the facility and surrounding community.

Upcoming Phoenix Ensemble concerts:

Thursday, June 26, 2008 1:30pm

Sirovich Community Center

331 East 12th Street (Manhattan)

Leonard Bernstein : Sonata for clarinet & piano

Samuel Barber : Adagio for Strings (original version)

WA Mozart : Quintet for Clarinet and Strings

Tuesday, September 9, 2008 1:30pm

Sirovich Community Center

331 East 12th Street (Manhattan)

WA Mozart: Kegelstatt Trio

Ives: Largo

Stravinksy: Soldier's Tale Suite (violin, clarinet, & Piano)

Both of these concerts are free to the public.

Music for the Elderly Series

Ansonia Music Outreach and our Access to Music program continue to bring free classical music performances and music events to residents of nursing homes, senior centers, and senior care facilities in New York City, through our Music for the Elderly Series. In 2007 we presented 40 concerts at 35 facilities in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Our goal is to present 45 concerts in 2008. In addition, we offer biweekly music and opera appreciation classes to senior centers in the city.

COMPOSER WORKSHOP

The goals of our Composer Workshop are to give composers of merit the opportunity to create new works, to make accessible important music of our time, and to work on ways in which the particular musical style or message of new works can be communicated to a general audience, particularly young audiences. Our first commercial CD, featuring the Phoenix Ensemble and the chamber music of Jonathan Dawe, was released in August of 2006. The recording was produced by the label Furious Artisans and co-funded by the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. Information on the recording can be found at www.furiousartisans.com.

We are currently working on a new CD with Furious Artisans and Innova Records featuring the Phoenix Ensemble and a world premiere recording of a work composed by Milton Babbitt. Milton Babbitt (b 1916) is one of the world’s most preeminent living composers. He is a principal developer of postwar musical thought and expression, theory, and pedagogy in the United States, and his influence on American musical composition has been enormously significant. He presently teaches composition at The Juilliard School and Princeton University. We take great pride in producing, with his approval, the first recording of his Clarinet Quintet, an important late work. Also Included on this disc will be Clarinet and String Quartet of Morton Feldman. This disc should be released in the beginning of 2009.

MUSIC FOR THE YOUNG

The mission of our Music for the Young program is to present innovative projects to young people that inspire interest in classical music and the arts, encourage creativity, and help make the arts an integral part of the school curriculum. Ansonia Music Outreach is now a contracted vendor with the New York City Department of Education, providing varied services designed to help implement their Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts, a new method of arts instruction for the city schools. During the 2007 – 2008 school year, we will work with several schools, providing ongoing group lessons, live concerts, student chamber music workshops, and varied services designed to help their music programs align with the guidelines and philosophy of the new Blueprint.

This project is presently funded through the generous help of Con Edison, the Assurant Foundation, and the Adrian and Jessie Archbold Charitable Trust. The Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts is an important step forward in establishing the arts as an essential element in public education, and we want to play our part in making this initiative a success.