Mellon Funds 3-Year, $450K eighth blackbird Residency at Curtis

Mellon Funds 3-Year, $450K eighth blackbird Residency at Curtis

The residency is “designed to prepare students to enter today’s challenging classical music world” and “will support the school’s aim to shape artistic leaders who find creative new ways to engage audiences while maintaining the highest artistic standards.” The sextet will visit for four weeks each year beginning in October 2012.

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NewMusicBox Staff

8bb

Photo by Luke Ratray

On the heels of their Grammy win, word comes that eighth blackbird will take up a 3-year residency at the Curtis Institute of Music, funded by a $450,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. According to the press release, the residency is “designed to prepare students to enter today’s challenging classical music world” and “will support the school’s aim to shape artistic leaders who find creative new ways to engage audiences while maintaining the highest artistic standards.” The sextet will visit for four weeks each year beginning in October 2012.

“A multi-year residency at the Curtis Institute of Music is both a great honor and a huge responsibility,” said eighth blackbird’s Tim Munro. “We aim to fill Curtis’s hallowed halls with eighth blackbird’s unique blend of musical curiosity, intelligence, flexibility, theatricality, entrepreneurial spirit, and humor. With any luck we will start and stoke a few artistic fires along the way.”

The ensemble’s residency activities include:

• collaboration and side-by-side performances with the Curtis 20/21 ensemble
• chamber music coachings
• readings of works by composition students
• seminars with student conductors
• leadership discussions
• world premieres of new works by annual composer-in-residence
• involvement in artistic planning of the annual All-School Project
• work with the community engagement program

(—condensed from the press release)