Electric Earth Concerts
Great Music All Year Round for the Monadnock Region
Jonathan Bagg & Laura Gilbert, Artistic Directors
Members of the Catalyst Quartet visited our partners at the Lukas Community in Temple to perform a 1-hour concert on Saturday, Sept 9. As always, their intensely riveting performance has a big impact on the residents at Lukas. With support form the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts.
On August 11, EEC musicians Stacey Shames, harp and Artistic Directors Laura Gilbert & Jonathan Bagg performed a free concert at the Root Cafe in Temple. The Root has become an impromptu community-building space for Temple and residents of surrounding towns through its commitment to hosting music-making of all sorts. EEC’s “Open Doors” concerts are sponsored by the NH State Council on the Arts.
Electric Earth Concerts has received an Art Works award of $10,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts, for its project titled Changing the Conversation.
Changing the Conversation presents great and rarely heard works in a series of four concerts exploring the interplay of gender, race, politics, and aesthetics that has helped to shape the language of American music during the last 100 years.
We will highlight the voices of women composers who struggled to be heard in the early decades of the 20th century, black and brown composers who brought their identity to the classical music of their day, and “maverick” composers who worked outside European aesthetic parameters.
We look forward to bringing you Changing the Conversation over the course of this season and next, as conditions allow.
Saturday, July 25, 2020,
Olly Wilson’s “A City Called Heaven” for large ensemble, Ben Johnston’s classic “Amazing Grace” quartet, a setting of spirituals by Mark Kuss, and a work by Anthony Kelly touch on the underlying theme of Changing the Conversation: how the interplay of gender, race, politics, and aesthetics has helped to shape the language of American music.
Sunday, August 2, 2020,
American Mavericks—New Morse Code + Thomas Kotcheff, in a Videocast of contemporary works by Philip Glass, Frederic Rzewski, David Lang, Tonia Ko and Thomas Kotcheff.
Saturday, August 15, 2020,
Four women, two of them African American, cover a huge stylistic range despite all being born prior to 1920, when the 19th amendment gave the vote to women. Music of Amy Beach, Marion Bauer, Undine Smith Moore, and Margaret Bonds. Part of a three-day commemoration of the suffrage centennial with events hosted by the Amos Fortune Forum, the Monadnock Lyceum, and Electric Earth Concerts. Featuring soprano Marlissa Hudson, and pianist Marvin Mills.
Saturday, December 5, 2020, 4:00 pm
Florence B. Price and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson contributed beautifully crafted work to the twentieth century repertoire but have not been widely celebrated; the Catalyst’s own Jessie Montgomery and Mexican composer Javier Álvarez complete this dynamic and eye-opening program.
We’ve just been notified that our “Open Doors” project will receive funding from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, in their General Projects category. This is the third year that Open Doors has been honored by this support, which goes toward free concerts at community learning spaces that are targeted specifically to family audiences. These concerts are for families to experience together and are meant to evoke in new listeners the excitement, appreciation, and even reverence, that can accompany hearing powerful music-making in a concert setting. We believe that early experiences such as these can be crucial to developing a young person’s desire to seek out live music as a form of artistic engagement later in life.
Vocalist Jazimina MacNeil and storyteller Odds Bodkin brought their unique collaboration to three EEC partners on October 4 & 5. Danika the Rose weaves an original story created by master raconteur Odds, (Bradford NH), between the songs of a mesmerizing song cycle by Antonin Dvorak. Jazimina (who resides in Chesham, NH) along with soprano Sarah Schaefer and pianist Emely Phelps performed the full version with Odds at Plowshare Farm in Greenfield on Friday Oct 4; the next day they did the shorter children’s version at Lukas Community in Temple and the Harris Center in Hancock. The piece is a truly gripping experience that seamlessly melds two art forms! Many thanks to the New Hampshire State Council on the arts for supporting Electric Earth’s “Open Doors” programming!
In November 2018, EEC was awarded a second New Hampshire State Council on the Arts “General Project” grant, for which we are immensely thankful. “Open Doors” is our name for a new initiative, a series of concerts in community spaces such as Libraries, where we will present concerts designed for the entire family to enjoy. These concerts will be designed for families (parents & children) to experience together. They are meant to evoke in new listeners the excitement, appreciation and even reverence that can accompany the experience of hearing powerful music-making in a concert setting.
We are delighted to again receive business sponsorship in 2019 from Grove St. Fiduciary in Peterborough, also from Petersons Real Estate in Peterborough, and from Belletetes building product specialists in Jaffrey. Also sponsoring a concert in 2019 is People’s United Bank of Peterborough.
And a big thank you to all of our many supporters in the community, who again showed their appreciation in 2018 for what we bring to the Monadnock Region.
The Putnam Foundation | The Gilbert Verney Foundation | The National Endowment for the Arts | The New Hampshire Charitable Foundation | The JWK Trust | Terra Nova Trust