2023 Grantees
The Musical Fund Society granted $64,820 to 14 organizations for projects in the 2022–23 season.
| Curtis Institute of Music | Curtis Institute of Music and the Sphinx Organization, a Detroit-based national organization dedicated to addressing diversity in the arts, will partner to safely bring the Sphinx Performance Academy to Curtis’s campus in June 2022. This full-scholarship summer program designed for Black and Latinx string players between the ages of 11 and 17 will be an intensive chamber music experience, and will provide a place for these young and talented musicians to once again make music with others. | $5,640 |
| Dolce Suono Ensemble | Dolce Suono Ensemble's “Música en tus Manos” (Music in Your Hands) project is an engagement initiative with Philadelphia’s Latino communities, through which we strive to enrich and inform people’s lives through the exploration of chamber and popular music of Latin America. We partner with Esperanza Academy, AMLA (Artistas y Músicos Latino Americanos), and Cayuga Elementary School on a residency culminating in public performances at the Esperanza Teatro, Iglesia Evangélica Bautista, and the DSE Presents concert series at Trinity Center for Urban Life featuring DSE's acclaimed artists, music students in side-by-side performances, and a new commissioned work by Daniel de Jesús. | $5,300 |
| PRISM Quartet | PRISM Quartet and The Crossing will co-commission a 60-minute work from Martin Bresnick for saxophone quartet and chamber choir and give the world premiere performance in Philadelphia in March 2023. | $5,280 |
| Mann Center for the Performing Arts | The Mann Center for the Performing Arts has expanded its All City Orchestra Summer Academy (ACOSA) from two to three weeks, beginning this summer 2022. The intensive summer program for 6th – 12th grade students will focus on high quality orchestra training, in partnership with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the School District of Philadelphia, and Project 440. | $5,200 |
| Ars Nova Workshop | ReSounding Progressions is a collaborative composition project undertaken between two generations of Philadelphia jazz greats: legendary saxophonist-composer Odean Pope and upcoming star saxophonist-composer Immanuel Wilkins. Working with poet and scholar Herman Beavers, they are exploring his poem "Progressions" to create an evening-length work for a bespoke 14-piece ensemble. | $5,100 |
| Bowerbird | Bowerbird is requesting support for "Iannis Xenakis’ PERSEPOLIS PHL", a recreation of the multimedia work Polytope de Persepolis by Iannis Xenakis. The Philadelphia recreation is planned to take place in FDR Park in South Philadelphia during the summer of 2023 and will consist of an array of 10 - 12 loudspeakers arranged in a circle along with special lighting reminiscent of the original. | $5,000 |
| Temple University Music Preparatory Division | Music Prep will initiate the Brass/Wind Project at Temple University (BWP@TU) to enable younger than traditional students to begin brass and woodwind instrument study. By employing specially designed instruments in graded sizes, and providing weekly sequential instruction, the program will serve as a scaffold for children to develop fundamental skills and progress for readiness to succeed in school instrumental music programs. | $5,000 |
| Piffaro, the Renaissance Band | Many so-called "New World" early music programs paint a picture of musical life in broad strokes, encompassing the whole of Central & South America and Mexico. Piffaro's concert program, "Entre dos álamos" (named after a popular tune of the period), will be a close study of the region of northern South America (present-day Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia) during the early period of Spanish colonization, from the early 16th to late 17th c., allowing a penetrating examination of the music produced by the collision of these cultures over two centuries. | $5,000 |
| Orchestra 2001 | Orchestra 2001 will present “George Crumb: Scores at an Exhibition,” a series of gallery exhibits and concerts displaying Crumb’s stunning, meticulous, hand-drawn scores as artwork, accompanied by his chamber music. Exhibit events will also feature his last completed work, “Metamorphosen, Book II,” with projections of the Klee, Wyeth, Dinnerstein, Klimt, Gauguin, Picasso, O’Keefe, Chagall, and van Gogh masterpieces that inspired Crumb’s modern day “Pictures at an Exhibition.” | $4,600 |
| Chester Children's Chorus | The Chester Children’s Chorus will learn and perform 15 movements of Handel’s Messiah alongside forty adult singers from the community, accompanied by an ensemble of professional musicians. The concert will showcase the musical excellence of this youth choir from one of the nation’s most distressed cities for an audience of 300 in the gorgeous, woodland amphitheater of Swarthmore College. | $4,500 |
| Tempesta di Mare | On Oct 21-23, 2022 Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra Tempesta di Mare performs music played by the virtuosic all-female ensembles of the Ospedali Grandi, baroque Venice’s four institutions that cared for its poor, sick and orphaned citizens, whose fame was lauded across Europe. Surrounding programming and documentation will explore the intersection of this fascination with talented female musicians with societal attitudes towards poverty, women, and disability and disfigurement. | $3,700 |
| Variant 6 | Variant 6 and Filament join forces to explore the myriad ways French composers wrote sacred music at the turn of the 18th Century. Our program, Virtue and Vice includes the moving and meditative Litanies de la Vierge, a dramatic telling of the martyrdom of St. Cecilia by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, and a selection of New World motets that were collected and performed in an Ursuline abbey in 18th-century New Orleans. | $4,100 |
| Network for New Music | Network for New Music presents Eve Beglarian's Murmur in the Trees for a community orchestra of basses performing outdoors. The performance site chosen for this event is the Awbury Arboretum in Germantown, situated on Lenape lands. Performance will also include a special commission from Lenape composer Brent Michael Davids for vocal ensemble singing and speaking traditional texts, and performing with bird-roars, original instruments designed by the composer. | $3,900 |
| Lyra Society | LyraLeader initiative places our most promising students in the position of leading Lyra Society into a thriving and equitable future. | $2,500 |