Comissioning Club

Over the last two years, I've used the "commissioning club" concept to raise money for two projects: first was for writing a piece for the ensemble Fireworks - that was recorded during a reading at the Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium in 2005. In the fall of 2006, the club matched a grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities for DCIC to make a studio recording. That turned into "Triangulation," our forthcoming CD. It's at Oasis CD Manufacturing now - we should get 500 copies delivered later this month.

The idea of the commissioning club is to aggregate gifts from a group of donors, at all levels, in order to commission new music, an opportunity that is typically only available to very wealthy individuals. Bang on a Can uses this model very effectively, they call theirs the "People's Commissioning Fund." My nonprofit, Improv Arts, hasn't come up with a catchy name yet.

For 2007, the Improv Arts Commissioning Club is collecting money to develop new music for The Low End String Quartet. In addition to this high-falutin' pan handling campaign, I wrote a bunch of grant proposals for the project. I already got rejected by Montgomery County, but haven't heard yet from the Argosy Foundation's Contemporary Music Fund or the DC Commission. Hopefully at least one of those will come through. My batting average for grants this year is pretty low. Zero, actually. So I'm due for a "yes" one of these days. It's discouraging to be rejected so many times, but that's the way it works.

For complete info about the commissioning club, click here.
For more about the Low End String Quartet, click here.