Core Values – Music That Matters

• Music is a necessity, not a luxury. As artists, we are strongly convinced our effort holds great spiritual value and communicates a much-needed message, an ingredient vital to individual and community health and growth.
• Music is relevant. Our work confronts the question, “What value does this music have for us, here in 21st Century America?” We answer with an artistic approach that takes the historic, spiritual, musical, and cultural context in which the music was created, and highlights its relevance for our time.
• Music engenders contemplation and growth. Informed by analysis and scholastic training, we pursue our interpretative ideas, refine them with the critical thinking of the latest research and the most rigorous published scholarship that we can comprehend, and present our product in life-giving performances that touch our audiences deeply, and stir in them, and us, contemplation of the most significant human experiences.
• Informed by history, dedicated to the present. Our concerts are not a visit to a museum. We take a deep knowledge of historical performance practice as a starting point, not an end-station. Realizing how music may have sounded to people in the 18th Century is only part of our preparation. Our audiences are part of the 21st Century, they cannot be “recreated,” they are not “replicas” of ancient European models.
• Our view is that a musician capable of understanding and communicating the depth and complexity of the music of Bach is a musician capable of doing many things well. Advanced training in our specialty repertoire, especially the cantatas and oratorios of Johann Sebastian Bach, enables the musician to excel in the entire range of the classical-choral music canon, including Renaissance masters such as Palestrina, Baroque composers such as Handel and Schütz, Classical composers like Mozart and Haydn, the Romantics, including Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and even the Modern composers like Brahms, Mahler, Strauss. The music of the 20th Century and beyond is greatly influenced by Bach.
• Audiences can also learn from Bach’s music. Our “Conversation Concerts” represent a popular and effective tool for accomplishing this task.
• Our focus is on sharing our gifts of music, knowledge, and experience, with audience members, emerging, and seasoned professional musicians. We strive for performances that cause both musician and audience to think and re-think human relationships, the world in which we live together, and how we live in the community.
• We believe that the arts are a catalyst for public dialogue, and that shared cultural experiences contribute to a sense of place and communal identity.