Piffaro, The Renaissance Band, Receives $10K NEA Grant

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Acting Chairman Joan Shigekawa announced today that Piffaro, The Renaissance Band is one of 895 nonprofit organizations nationwide to receive an NEA Art Works grant. Piffaro, The Renaissance Band is recommended for a $10,000 grant to support Dresden Vespers 1619, with a special guest from Boston, the highly esteemed Renaissance choral ensemble, Blue Heron (blueheronchoir.org).

In 1619, the three great German composers Michael Praetorius, Heinrich Schütz, and Samuel Scheidt found themselves in Dresden, where together they contributed to the festive masses and vespers of the court chapel of the Elector JohAnn George I (a convert to the reformation principles of Martin Luther). Piffaro will celebrate that remarkable musical meeting by recreating an Advent Vespers service in the Reformed tradition of the early 17th century, to take place in December of 2014. The concert will be re-broadcast in its entirety on WWFM's Distant Mirror early music show and selections will be featured on American Public Media's Performance Today. Philadelphia has a rich German culture, and community engagement activities will take place in conjunction with the project to forge an appreciation of the important early contributions these great composers made to the great Germanic tradition in classical music.

Acting Chairman Shigekawa said, "The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support these exciting and diverse arts projects that will take place throughout the United States. Whether it is through a focus on education, engagement, or innovation, these projects all contribute to vibrant communities and memorable experiences for the public to engage with the arts."

Art Works grants support the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence: public engagement with diverse and excellent art, lifelong learning in the arts, and enhancing the livability of communities through the arts. The NEA received 1,528 eligible Art Works applications, requesting more than $75 million in funding. Of those applications, 895 are recommended for grants for a total of $ 23.4 million.

For a complete listing of projects recommended for Art Works grant support, please visit the NEA website at arts.gov.

About Piffaro, The Renaissance Band: "Widely regarded as North America's masters of music for Renaissance wind band" (St. Paul Pioneer Press), Piffaro, the Renaissance Band was founded in Philadelphia in 1980 to recreate the rustic music of the peasantry and the elegant sounds of the professional wind bands of the late Medieval and Renaissance periods. Its seven members are "energetic but fastidious performers: the recorder playing has a gorgeous, woody transparency; the reeds and sackbuts are raucous, bright and precisely tuned; and the bagpipes are marvelously wheezy." (New York Times) Piffaro inaugurated its yearly concert series in 1985 and, led by artistic directors Joan Kimball and Robert Wiemken, is presenting 12 subscription concerts in Center City, Chestnut Hill, and in Wilmington, Delaware.

The ensemble made its European debut at Tage Alter Musik in Regensburg in 1993 and has since appeared at major festivals in Austria, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, The Czech Republic, Spain, England, the Netherlands, Colombia, and Bolivia. In the U.S., Piffaro has performed at early music festivals in Boston, Berkeley, Indianapolis, and Madison (for which Wiemken is Artistic Advisor), and on seasons presented by Music Before 1800 in NYC, The Cloisters Museum and Gardens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Seattle Early Music Guild, the San Francisco Early Music Society, Milwaukee's Early Music Now, the Detroit Chamber Music Society, and Pittsburgh Renaissance & Baroque, among others.

Piffaro's members are active in the research and making of historically based instruments and reeds, and its collection of professional-quality, careful reconstructions of period instruments now numbers over 40. The ensemble has issued an "unfailingly outstanding series of discs," (Fanfare Magazine) on Newport Classics, Deutsche Grammophon/Archiv Produktion, Dorian Recordings, PARMA/Navona, and on its own house label.

Affectionately known as "the pied pipers of early music," Piffaro was awarded Early Music America's "Early Music Brings History Alive" award in 2003 and Laurette Goldberg Award for Lifetime Achievement in Early Music Education and Outreach in 2011.

To post a comment, you must register and login.