Early Music Month Mini-Grants

To celebrate Early Music Month, EMA recognizes outstanding community engagement projects of individuals and organizations that take place in March. Early Music Month Mini-Grants support selected creative projects with supplemental funding.

2025 Mini-Grant Recipients

Early Music America is pleased to award the following ensembles and organizations Early Music Month Mini-Grants for projects to be held during March 2025. The judges where impressed by the scope of these proposals and their potential to expand the reach of early music. We look forward to sharing more about these projects as they occur throughout Early Music Month.

Early Music Hawai’i (Honolulu, HI)
Project: An American Journey

While Early Music Hawaii typically presents European music from the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, this March we plan to share early American and missionary-inspired Hawaiian music with our audience. This concert is a foray into a new territory for our organization that looks at some of the early music of cultures represented here in Hawai‘i, connecting our islands’ past with the present. This special significance, combined with the historical importance and beauty of the repertoire, make this an exciting venture for us.

The concert begins with works of the popular Singing Schools of mid-18th-century America, which spread the music of The New-England Psalm Singer across the States “singing and making melody” and “teaching and admonishing.” Missionaries introduced this music to the Hawaiian Islands in the 1830s, where it was reinvented within a new cultural context, incorporating the sounds and rhythms of the Hawaiian language. The composers featured in this program will include early English-American composers William Billings, Abraham Wood, Justin Morgan, and Oliver Morgan. The second half of the program will include works composed by native Hawaiian composers, and English and German missionaries who wrote for the church in Hawai‘i.

Montréal Baroque, Inc. (Montréal, QC)
Project: Les grands espaces

“Les grands espaces” is designed for elementary school children from several cities in Quebec. With this project, Montréal Baroque hopes to introduce at least 100 children to early music (choral singing and recorder) and to traditional Inuit throat singing. In March 2025, harpsichordist and choir director Johanne Couture and recorder player Vincent Lauzer will visit three schools to prepare their students for the performance they will give as part of the Montréal Baroque Festival on June 21, 2025. Students from three schools in three different cities will be invited to sing and/or play the recorder for a few pieces of early and new music that they will have prepared in advance with the Festival’s professional musicians.

Vincent Lauzer and Johanne Couture will visit three institutions in March: École Alpha in Rosemère, the Conservatoire de musique de Gatineau, and the English Montreal School Board. During each one-hour workshop, they will work with students on three short works, all inspired by nature: a simple Renaissance song that can be sung or played on the recorder (“Herbes et fleurs, et prés verdoyants” by Clément Janequin), a song written by a Canadian author on the melody of Antonio Vivaldi’s concerto “L’Inverno”, and “Les grands espaces,” a work by Quebec composer Katia Makdissi-Warren inspired by the sounds of nature and traditional Inuit throat singing. This last piece is written for a children’s choir and a solo throat singer who will join the children during the concert at the Festival. A video about this ancient and traditional musical practice will be shown to the students during the March workshops. For the workshops, Johanne Couture and Vincent Lauzer will travel with a large collection of recorders and a virginal. They will play with the students and introduce them to these early instruments that they probably have never seen before. Other meetings with the students will be organized in April and May 2025.

This introduction to early music and instruments offers a dialogue between professional musicians and students as well as a dialogue between music from different traditions: early music from Western and indigenous traditions, Renaissance, Baroque and contemporary music. “Les grands espaces” demonstrates to what extent nature has inspired artists of many origins, of many eras.

Musicians of the Old Post Road (Brighton, MA)
Project: Storytelling through Baroque Music: A presentation for Boston Elementary School Students

The project is an in-school educational presentation for 4th-6th graders at the Mary Lyon K-8 School that will introduce young listeners to period instruments and Baroque music. The repertoire chosen for this will be programmatic selections that will engage the students in the storytelling aspect of music. Seven musicians will participate in the program that will include traversi, violins, viola, cello, and harpsichord. The repertoire selections will include excerpts from Vivaldi’s “Night” Concerto, Couperin’s “Apotheosis of Corelli,” and Geminiani’s “Enchanted Forest.” At the conclusion of the presentation, students will have the opportunity to ask questions and to see the instruments up close.

This project marks a pilot collaboration between Musicians of the Old Post Road and the Mary Lyon K-8 School, a public school in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston. The Lyon is a full-inclusion school, and as part of its mission, all classrooms are composed of a blend of special education and general education students. The music teacher and staff at the school are very excited about the presentation.

Sarah Cranor (Lawrence and Monroe Counties, IN)
Project: Go Baroque! Middle School Orchestra Historical Performance Mini-Residencies

During the pandemic, I spent one year teaching middle school orchestra classes — 6th, 7th, and the 8th grade orchestra class in Bedford, Indiana — and discovered my great passion for sharing early repertoire with these young musicians. I have found that there is much baroque-era repertoire that fits their technical level, which allows students to dive into the musical concepts of dynamics, phrasing, articulation, tempi, affect, etc., right away. This both deepens their understanding of the music and allows ownership over musical decisions, both in rehearsal and performance. We fostered a sense of spontaneity and trust, adding embellishments and ornamentation, and used the idea of affect to help make sense of the music we were playing in a way that would be compelling to their audience.

Building from that, I have developed and maintained partnerships with other middle school orchestra directors in Monroe and Lawrence counties in Indiana. These mini-residencies will be the third year I offer spring semester workshops at no cost, coming to each orchestra class to give a short introduction to the baroque violin as a way to discuss historical performance (middle schoolers particularly love gut strings — “gross!”) and then work with the orchestra on the baroque-era piece they are already rehearsing, with a specific emphasis in how a historically-informed approach could shape their music-making. For example, this could be looking at harmonic motion, finding the most intense harmony and shaping the dynamics accordingly, or taking turns with different students spontaneously leading a dynamic scheme via body language, adding imaginary words to slurs and dots to make articulation come alive, or collectively deciding the affect (or as the students usually like to call it, the “vibe”) of the piece to help make the performance more compelling. We begin from a place of “who cares?,” or, why does looking at this old music in this historically-informed way make a difference to how it feels to play and listen, and use this as a tool to empower each musician in the creative process.

Southern California Early Music Society (Los Angeles, CA)
Project: SoCal Early Music Day: A Community Festival

On March 15th, musicians of all backgrounds — professional, amateur, college students, and youth — will come together for a one-day festival celebrating Early Music. The event will consist of:

• Two professionally-coached workshop time blocks, offering participants a chance to read through repertoire for period instruments (adult winds, strings, and youth recorders, separately) where participants can also choose a vocal workshop. We will have specialists in the various instruments leading these workshops
• An Historical Instrument Petting Zoo, wherein participants—including children—can learn about and try unfamiliar instruments
• An Exhibition of local period instruments for sale, local Early Music education programs, and local Early Music performance groups. Bruce Teter will partner with local period instrument vendors, including Curtis Berak and Warren Shingleton, to orchestrate an interactive demonstration of various wind and string instruments, with opportunities for participants to test some out. Instruments available for purchase will be exhibited in a community room throughout the day.
• A Showcase for local Early Music organizations involving a 10-minute performance.
• A Tutti Sing/Play Along, bringing all participants together in the performance of one professionally-directed piece.

In addition to Nicole Baker and Marylin Winkle, professional coaches will include such renowned Early Music leaders as Inga Funck and Alexa Haynes-Pilon, among others (to be confirmed). Both workshop blocks will be inclusive of all players regardless of technical ability. Time will be split between reading new repertoire and working in sectionals to prepare for the tutti sing/play along at the end.

Previous Recipients