Procrastination

I have new respect for people whose work requires them to stare at a computer for hours on end. To be fair, I've only really been at this for one hour max, but that's a lot for me - come on, I'm a musician! Among my assigned duties from the last Aeolus Summit (business meeting/pizza party, held most Wednesday evenings, feel free to drop by) was the task of adding all of our concerts for the 2010-2011 season to the calendar on our website. I've barely made a dent, and I'm already taking a break :( but kudos to Nick for compiling all the concert info in the first place!

I'm learning a lot about us through this process, actually. As in, that we are playing the same program 3 days in a row in Austin in November? I hope there are enough people in this city that want to hear Schumann Piano Quintet and Bartok 4! But we are playing those concerts with the fabulous pianist Rick Rowley, so that should help. I also discovered that we are spending 4 days in a hotel in Times Square for the Chamber Music America conference, and we're giving a recital there!! Through the determination, willpower, and grant-writing skills of the amazing Kathryn Hutchison, we (via UT) are the fortunate recipients of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts for the performance of American music. We just saw a copy of the grant proposal, and it is actually approx. 7 million pages long. This grant secured the NY performance, among others... about which I'm sure I would learn more, if I could only convince myself to finish updating this thing.

But more awesome things about the grant - we will be releasing a CD on the Longhorn label distributed by Naxos in the spring! All American works, and hopefully this recording process will be less grueling than the one we experienced last February. Although we certainly had the very best technical and moral support from our family at the Butler School of Music, which made the process that much more bearable! And thankfully that project has finally come to fruition - last week we had a 9 hour stint in the mastering studio preparing our Feb recording of Brahms c minor and Bartok 5 for release on Longhorn/Naxos at the end of October! With beautiful album artwork by the one and only Nathan Russell :)

Anyway, next time you click on one of those little black calendar boxes on our schedule page, that say basically the same thing as the full concert listing to the left, but in a possibly more visually stimulating format, please remember the sweat and tears that went into the operation. Thank you for taking the time to stop by, we love you!

(I just rediscovered this photo, I think it's from my surprise birthday party back in our Cleveland days. Obviously not much has changed in this ensemble)