Tag: Queen City and Tar Heel State

MoogFest Set for October in Asheville

Instead of writing more about Les Paul and Google’s homepage guitar logo, I thought I’d direct your attention to another music-technology innovator and the festival named in his honor.

Last week, MoogFest announced the bands appearing in October down in Asheville, NC on October 28-30. The headliner is Flaming Lips, but Battles are also appearing. A video that runs down the list is here.

Last year, I posted a video of Robert Moog explaining his Minimoog synthesizer. This year, to celebrate its founder’s birthday, the Moog company put out its own YouTube video on the history of its most celebrated product:

Charlotte Symphony Summer Haul Less This Year

The $100,000-plus that the Charlotte Symphony took in last year at their summer concerts helped keep them afloat this season. According to the WFAE website, audience members were a little less generous this year, although they still collectively chipped in $75,832.

As orchestra executive director mentions, one of the reasons for the reduced total is that many people might assume that the Charlotte Symphony has solved its money problems. It hasn’t; it’s only bought itself some time. 

Busy in Brevard: Music Stuff

A couple of weeks ago, Bob Aldridge gave his Brevard Music Institute composition students the same assignment, to set Walt Whitman’s “When the Dazzle of Day is Gone.” Last Thursday, he hosted an afternoon concert of the results.

If there was a time when young composers were afraid to write a triad, that time is long gone. In fact, I get the distinct impression that these Brevardians were deliberately avoiding anything that would mark them as “inaccessible.” I heard some Barber, some Broadway, and some Blue.

On Saturday night, the college students joined up with their teachers for a bang-up Heldenleben. WDAV broadcast this last Sunday, plugging Kalichstein’s Schumann Concerto. But that was a real disappointment. The orchestra was great, but the pianist just wasn’t prepared. If you can, skip it and listen to the Strauss online.

The high school students at Brevard showed their stuff Sunday afternoon, starting their concert with Joan Tower‘s Made in America. Someone at the festival called this a “dark depiction” of our country, but this performance was full of optimistic energy.

Joe Schwantner wrote the second piece in the Ford Made in America program, and took it around the country the last two seasons. Let’s hope Keith Lockhart brings this piece to Brevard as well soon.

Busy in Brevard: The Cradle of Forestry

A couple of days ago, the children, Vanessa, and I spent over two hours at the Cradle of Forestry historic site in the Pisgah National Forest.

The highlight of the trip for Alex and Caitlin was, as it is for many the old steam engine. You’ll find this late 19th-century relic on the outdoor path, but there are some fun displays in the visitors center as well.

The Pisgah National Forest was once private land owned by the Vanderbilts. Carl A. Schenck, a German charged with maintaining the forest, founded the first forestry school there in 1898. Today, the Pisgah Forest is owned and maintained by the federal government.

Search “Cradle of Forestry” on YouTube for some videos of the steam engine (apparently, it’s a hit with a lot of kids). We’ve got some videos and pictures, which we’ll post later.

Hear Brevard on the Radio

You owe it to yourself to take a listen to at least one of the concerts from the Brevard Music Festival that classical stations WDAV (in Charlotte) and WCQS (in Brevard). The show is called Open Air Brevard, and it’s on Sundays at 3 PM.  The orchestra is made up of students and faculty. The quality of the performances from the kids is really high, and the faculty is really committed.

Here’s a video a scenes from the Fourth of July band concert. It’s not the most exciting clip you’ve ever seen, but it’ll give you an idea of what it’s like here. You can see my in-laws at 1:14. People really like the cannons in the 1812 Overture here, by the way.

North Carolina Dance Theatre Gala Tonight

The North Carolina Dance Theatre just finished up its perennial run of Nutcracker performances, and it will be opening its new Patricia McBride & Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux Center for Dance on Tryon Street, just uptown from the Knight Theater, later this year.

The Dance Theater gala comes on the heels of the January 2 opening of Charlotte’s new Bechtler Museum of Modern Art (photos here and here), part of the Wells Fargo Cultural Campus. This two-block-long strip on South Tryon Street includes the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture and the Mint Museum uptown expansion, which is set to open in October. 

Charlotte Arts City?

Something’s going on in Charlotte. On Saturday, only a few months after the city’s orchestra was bailed out by former Bank of America head Hugh McColl and the C. D. Spangler Foundation, a new performance space, the Knight Theater, hosted an open house.

The 1,150-seat hall is part of the so-called Wells Fargo Cultural Campus, a two-block-long strip on South Tryon Street that includes new homes for the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture and the Mint Museum, as well the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, set to open in January.

Further uptown, the North Carolina Dance Theatre is building its own headquarters, complete with administrative offices, a costume shop, and, most importantly, six studios for rehearsals and teaching. There are also plans to open a black box theater within the 34,000-square-foot space, which sits beside the ten-year-old McColl Center for Visual Art.

This mini-boom shows that there’s definitely philanthropic interest in beautifying the Queen City, but it remains to be seen whether there will be a sustained commitment to the organizations that curate the exhibitions, play the music, and dance the dances in the new buildings. The Charlotte Symphony plays in a good-looking, relatively new concert hall built in the mid-1990s, but struggles financially and nearly folded over the summer.

It also remains to be seen whether the public will show sufficient interest to keep funders engaged. For most non-profit arts organizations, ticket sales aren’t a significant revenue source, but nobody–not big-money donors, not the government–wants to give money to groups that appear irrelevant to the community at large.