gods & monsters & a sorceress

Some local artists are raising funds for projects that sound worth supporting:

Locally sourced tenor Nicholas Phan is running an IndiGoGo campaign for his latest solo CD, Gods & Monsters, in which he and pianist Myra Huang perform German lieder (by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Wolf, and Mahler) that center on myths, legends, and fairy tales, involving gods, monsters, witches, and "other fantastical creatures." Phan's other solo albums have been sterling and this looks like a wonderful program. You can find out more, check out the offered premiums, and contribute if you are so minded, here. The campaign ends in a few days.

Curious about what else was being performed at the opera houses in the days of Monteverdi? Ars Minerva, which is led by soprano Céline Ricci, is the place to find out. The youngest company performing the oldest operas, Ars Minerva has announced their third revival of a long-forgotten work from the giddy days of seventeenth-century Venetian opera: La Circe, attributed to Pietro Andrea Ziani with a libretto by Cristoforo Ivanovich, about the enchantress celebrated by Homer and Ovid. I attended the company's first two productions (La Cleopatra by Castrovillari and The Amazons in the Fortunate Isles by Pallavicino), and both were completely entertaining and delightful and extremely well done on a limited budget. If you'd like to help out their work – and reviving seventeenth-century Venetian operas is God's own work, make no mistake – you may find out more and donate here.

Alice Guy-Blache: finding and funding

To answer the question asked in this kickstarter campaign, yes, I have heard of Alice Guy-Blache, and I have even seen some of her films, in Kino Lorber's second set of Gaumont Treasures. But I can't say I know a whole lot about her, and would really love to see the documentary that Pamela Green and Jarik van Sluijs are trying to make. So if you are so minded and have the cash to spare, you have until midnight (Pacific time) on Monday 26 August (coming right up!) to give way to your Medici impulses and help them out. Here's the link again, now that you're persuaded.

helpful advice for fund-raisers in the arts

Here it is: I am not kidding when I tell you not to call me.

Perhaps some dimwit consultant has told you that calling helps establish human contact, thereby presumably rendering me more likely to donate. Unless the human contact you're looking for includes irritation and harassment, which, I should point out, make me less likely to give, even to groups I generally support, then please consider that bad advice.

I generally solve this problem by not answering my phone (leading to occasional awkwardness when I do pick it up and it's someone I know who was clearly hoping for voicemail). But some of these groups also have my work number, where I am generally expected to pick up the phone when it rings. And no matter what I say, they keep calling.

I tell them I never pledge money over the phone. ("Oh, why not?" one asked. "Because then people keep calling," I explained, before hanging up.)

I tell them I prefer to donate when I renew a subscription. They seem to think that, since they are so worthy, I should donate on their schedule, not my own.

I tell them that they can send me something in the mail or through e-mail. They then call back to follow up on what they sent.

I do actually donate to arts groups, which is why I don't just hang up on such callers the way I hang up on those people who call suggesting I really need to refinance my mortgage. Hence the awkwardness! But it's a simple and obvious matter of customer relations: you don't contact customers (that is, people from whom you want money) in a way that is guaranteed to piss them off. I am using many italics in this entry, because I can't emphasize this enough, and arts groups really don't seem to understand this. I've already stopped giving to one group in part because of my irritation at their fund-raising practices. And the past couple of weeks another group, one which I still support (ironically, one I give to because I appreciate how considerate they are to their donors and subscribers) has been harassing me at work with calls, which is making me reconsider my normal donation to this group. (Here's a hint: both of these groups have "Performances" in their name.)

All businesses need occasional reminders not only that the customer is not there for their convenience, but that it's the other way around. If you are working from a phone list it's easy enough to put "do not call" next to someone's name. Seriously. How many ways can I say this? And how many times do I need to say this?

the Berkeley New Music Project

Yesterday evening I was dragging my jet-lagged self from work to The Hard Nut, and even on the lower level of the Berkeley BART station I could hear lilting carols, which is not the kind of thing you normally hear at the Berkeley BART station, even at this festive season of the year. So, being semi-flush with bills, when I reached the upper level I put a few in the bucket. The gentleman on the far left in the picture below said, "Thank you" and handed me a slip of paper.

One side said the Berkeley New Music Project and the other said:

"We are graduate student composers and friends of the composition program at UC Berkeley['s] Department of Music. We're raising money to support our performing organization, the Berkeley New Music Project. Each semester, BNMP presents 1-2 concerts of graduate student compositions. Recent budget cuts have left us with a funding shortage that we need to make up in order to uphold the standard of high-quality professional performance that has become a vital component of our program. A donation today will go directly toward funding our concert next semester (April 4, 2010)."

You can mail contributions to them at:

Department of Music
University of California, Berkeley
104 Morrison Hall #1200
Berkeley, CA 94720-1200
(Specify "Berkeley New Music Project")

Or you may contribute online here. And you can read about the group here. And their next concert is this Thursday, December 17, at 7:00 p.m. at Hertz Hall on the Berkeley campus.

I think it's great they're out raising money and publicizing themselves (this was the first time I'd heard of this group). And I'm sure it's good practice for their future. But I also think it's a shame they have to turn busker to raise funds rather than just to gain publicity: you'd think a major public university could finance something as basic as performances of graduate student compositions (oh, my alma mater!). It just seems like a symptom of the growing corporatization of American universities: the administration and the Board are taken care of, and so are departments that can get corporate funding, and everything else (in other words, the things universities primarily exist to preserve, protect, and expand) gets tossed by the wayside. (I should probably clarify that these opinions are mine and not those of this group; my only conversation with them was to ask if I could take their picture.)

So if you're looking for a recipient for any year-end donations, why not show some faith in the future of music and think of this group.