Over halfway through

Yesterday was Day 16 of our 30-day Kickstarter campaign to fund our first recording. We now have exactly 13 days left to meet our funding goal of $9000, with only $3850 left to raise.

To celebrate the overwhelming support so many have shown us, and make our fans really crave our upcoming recording, we made a Youtube video. We hope you enjoy the short musical selection in our video! It’s from Robert Schumann’s song cycle, Dichterliebe, which we arranged for harp and horn.

Please share our video with your friends and colleagues. Facebook, Twitter, and forwarding this email are all great ways to spread the word. And if you have not yet joined our project as a backer, you can read more and and pledge directly through our Kickstarter page.

First week

It has been thrilling to see how many of our fans are joining us in making our first recording project. Our backer numbers increase visibly each day! Because we are running an all-or-nothing campaign, our project’s main risk is that it won’t be possible if it isn’t funded in full by Dec. 1. Thanks to several generous (and early) donors, though, we are well on track to meeting our goal, and with a wonderfully exciting start last week. Here are some illuminating numbers:

Within two hours of our campaign’s beginning on Nov. 1, backers had donated a total of over $2000 dollars!
As of today, Nov. 7, we have 18 backers, who will be receiving free tracks, CDs, posters, and written recognition as friends and sponsors. One of our project’s friends even gets to name a piece for us to arrange and play.
We have raised $3146 toward our goal of $9000 by Dec. 1. That’s 35% of our project funding (accomplished in 23% of our 30-day duration).

Apple Orange Pair’s first recording!

Today we start our 30-day Kickstarter campaign to make our first recording!

We encourage you to visit our Kickstarter page, where you can also watch our project video for a personal message from us. You can read a longer project description there too, or read this post for the condensed version.

We hope this project excites you as much as it does us! You can back us online through our Kickstarter page, which is only live until December 1.

Click on our project picture to view our Kickstarter page & video!

About our project

Our recording will feature new pieces we have commissioned and performed the past two years by composers Russell Nadel, Michael Weinstein-Reiman, Naftali Schindler, and Beth May. We are also recording a handful of our personal arrangements of classical favorites. All together, we are recording about 60 minutes of music. We hit the recording studio starting in January 2013, with a release date in late June.

The pieces on our recording are all brand-new pieces that have not been professionally recorded or released before. Each of them highlights the harp and the horn, individually and together, in ways that no other pieces we have yet performed do. We have already performed most of these pieces in Connecticut and Maine earlier this year for live audiences who, like us, are excited about this new music! We are eager to make this music available to wider audiences and performers soon through our recording.

Don’t just take our word for how great this music is though! We’d love it if you “listened ahead” to samples of these pieces, which you can find streaming online on our music page. (We will be adding more clips throughout our 30-day project, so check back often!)

How you can help

We are specially asking for YOUR help in bringing our project to fruition! From the recording sessions to its design, packaging, and manufacture, our project requires at least $9000 for us to do it the right way.

If we meet our goal, you will be part of our project’s creation the whole way as a backer. We’ll send you regular email updates, sneak previews of tracks, our entire digital album, a signed CD, and you even have the opportunity to have us perform live at your own house! You will actually receive our recording before our album is publicly released. Finally, you’ll also have the satisfaction of knowing that you contributed to a valuable creative cause, supported the fine arts in these dire times, and championed the cause of new classical music for two unique instruments.

If you decide to “back” our project, please do it soon (and spread the word to your music-loving friends and family!). This is an all-or-nothing campaign: If we do not meet our goal of $9000 by December 1, we will not receive ANY funding at all. And the earlier in our campaign that you back us, the higher the odds that our project will succeed. (Even $10 goes a long way and will earn you our eternal gratitude and a free track!)

Thank you

Thank you, as always, for your ongoing support of our musical endeavors. It is a privilege performing for you, working with you, and knowing you. We are excited to have you join us on our next harp-and-horn adventure!

Changing gears for 2012-2013

Performing at the Atlantic Music Festival in Waterville, ME. Photo courtesy of Abby Ang.

After a successful round of performances in the Atlantic Music Festival’s summer salon series, we returned to Connecticut in August to finish our demo recordings of our three 2012 commissions.

Less than a week later, Colleen and her husband moved to Bluefield, Virginia, in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains.

Thus we begin our 2012-2013 season living 650 miles apart. The plan? Well, we are hard at work right now preparing our Kickstarter campaign to fund our first full-length recording. Our CD will feature some of our favorite commissions (five new pieces to date!) as well as a few pieces we have enjoyed performing together the past two years. We are looking forward to recording sessions starting in January 2013! We hope to release our album by May 2013.

In the meantime, we are busily booking concerts for May 2013, including venues in Virginia, DC, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Our Kickstarter campaign starts this Monday, October 22. Stay tuned for updates, or join our
email list for weekly updates as we prepare for our recording!

apple orange pair awarded Yale grant

If you have been coming to our concerts in New Haven the past few years, you have probably been among the many who have asked us, “Do you have a CD?”

We didn’t, at the time. But we will later this year! Our first CD, as well as composer commissions for the pieces it will feature, will be funded in part by the Yale School of Music‘s alumni fund.

The YSM’s alumniVenture awards were established in 2008 to support musical projects by alumni that “advance the cause of music” in communities and throughout the world. Grant awards are highly competitive each year, so we were particularly honored to be selected for an award based on our first proposal!

with composer Russell Nadel after the premiere of "Orchard Sunset," May 2011

Our project will culminate in a recording of new music for horn and harp in August. Perhaps more importantly, though, our project and its recording will be centered around commissions of new pieces for horn and harp. Since founding AOP in 2010, one of our priorities has been to add to the 21st century repertoire for our instruments while simultaneously shining a spotlight on some of the many talented, emerging composers with whom we are privileged to work. Commissions specifically funded by our alumniVenture grant are by composers Naftali Schindler of Israel, Sarah Beth May of San Antonio, TX, and Michael Weinstein Reiman of New York City.

Our May 26 concert program “Infamous Composers II” will feature two of these new pieces, and a third will be premiered this summer at the Atlantic Music Festival in Waterville, ME. Our recording will feature these three pieces by the following composers, in addition to our 2011 commission, “Orchard Sunset,” by Russell Nadel.

We can’t wait to share some of this wonderful new music with you! Stay tuned for information about our May 26 concert, our summer recording project, and ways that you can be involved in our activities.