Project DOM

Come one, come all to the first annual Day of Music presented by the Aspen Music Festival & School. Day of Music or “Project DOM” as I call it is my first real time super time consuming extra project of the summer (July 4th Band was extra but not nearly as complex as DOM). Basically here’s the breakdown. About 3 weeks ago, I caught wind of this assignment during a meeting. The powers that be said…

“Maestro Zinman came up with this idea to feature the actual school side of the Festival. Basically, we want to open up our campus to the public all morning and invite them to hear performances, master classes, and coaching sessions featuring the students…not just another big name soloist or conductor. Then, in the afternoon, we want to continue with these student performances down at our main performance venue and highlight the evening with a big Family Concert and Wind Ensemble Concert. On top of it all, we want to make it all free of charge to the public. Good? Great. Ok Jeff, you have three weeks to book the performance spaces, find student groups to play (despite conflicts with three major orchestras in the morning), come up with a program, market it to the public, make signs, make flyers, make handouts, get volunteers to help, draw stage plots, get the audio crew to man microphones, get house management staff to usher, arrange transportation for the public, and be on call the whole day. Oh and by the way, we don’t have any budget allocated for this.”

Needless to say, this has been a whale of a project. Fortunately, I have had plenty of help from our scheduling coordinator (thank you Elizabeth) and with just under a week to go, I am beginning to feel pretty good about it. Honestly, it has been pretty exciting to know that this project could very well kick off a solid annual tradition that bridges a major gap between the community and the School. I guess that throughout the year, I will have the opportunity to contribute to some pretty lasting pillars of each organization I visit. Pretty
exciting huh?

Check out the schedule for the first annual AMFS Day of Music (in .pdf format). front/back