Announcing: The Telling Stories holiday gift!

We’ve got a way for you to both invest your holiday dollars in the local arts community and send cool holiday presents. From now until December 11, all donations of $20 and more gets you a unique Telling Stories gift – we’ll mail a personal card and a CD of our first concert (professionally produced by Colorado Public Radio’s talented Martin Skavish) to the person of your choice.

So, let’s recap. You want to buy meaningful gifts. You want to help us reach our $5,000 fundraising goal so we can keep putting on our creative concerts in your community. Every $20 you pledge to our online fundraising site, Kickstarter, can send a unique gift to friends and family, as well as support us. And you didn’t even have to visit a strip mall!

Thanks for helping us reach our goal!

Jennie

Pilots

Pilots, inspired by “firsts”: composers’ opus ones and writers’ first experiences.

Tonight’s concert: 6 p.m.

Hello friends,

We’ve all been wonky since Daylight Savings Time gave us an hour of bright sunshine in the morning and utter darkness at 5 p.m. The wonkiness extended to a few of our concert listings, which have read that we’re performing tonight at 6:30 p.m. We’ll actually be performing a bit earlier than that — tonight’s show starts right at 6 p.m. Get there a few minutes early to get a good seat, and we’ll see you at the D Note tonight!

Cheers,

Jennie

Q & A

by David Short, Telling Stories cellist

There is an awkward question in the world of musicians.  The question in itself is not awkward; it’s quite normal and should be, in the grand scheme, asked. Questions themselves are not awkward in any way, either. They are quite normal and should be, more often than not in the grand scheme, asked more frequently then they are.  That however, is not my fault.

The Question in question is this:

“How did you get the gig?”

The Answer, incidentally, should always be the same:

“They asked me and I said yes.”

It is simple, to the point, and not nearly as exciting as it could be.  It is, regardless, always the correct Answer.

The stories that musicians use to answer the Question are generally a lot longer than that.  They involve who called whom and why.  They involve “Which excerpts did you have to play?” and “Oh, did you see the bottle of Jack on the table when you went into the audition room?”  They involve stories about phone tag on long car rides to Durango or Telluride or Steamboat Springs.  In the end, however, the Why is also always the same.  Someone is trying to fill out their requirements for a gig — show, major orchestra contract, what have you — and they ask you.  You say “yes,” and you play the gig.

Sometimes the pronouns for the Question change depending on who is doing the asking.  For example: “How did he get the gig?” spoken in a disdainful tone has an entirely different set of meanings associated with it.  It could imply that if the pronoun, he, were to suffer from the sudden and terribly debilitating hand condition “Hand in Door,” he would not be likely to receive flowers from the asker of the Question.  If he reads too much into the tone of the Question, it may lead him to thinking of spreading the equally horrid conditions of “Hand in Window” or “Really Bad Hang Nail.”  This is what is known as a “bad thing,” and is awful for both people involved.  In fact, all of this pain, anguish and mental assault becomes unnecessary if they both remember they already know the Answer.

You are probably wondering whose words you have been navigating for the last two minutes.  The answer is, “mine.”  I am David Short, the cellist from Telling Stories and I decided somewhere in the last few weeks that I would try and keep a blog going.  It would be a blog about whatever I wanted.  It would be a blog that would help me work out whatever deep-seated personal issues I have at that particular moment (aren’t you glad?).  It would probably even be a blog mostly about music.  I think I came up with this idea in that delirious state between 1 and 2 a.m.   That time when everything seems like a good idea because your brain is trying to shove the subconscious back into the box it comes in.  This idea somehow got out.

Anyway, I’ve been playing with Telling Stories for a while, and lately I’ve been trying to keep track of the musicians and essayists who are going to be recording for our Podcasts.  They will be here soon, the recordings, not the essayists and musicians.   They’ve already done their work.

Now I’m going to answer the Question that everyone may or may not be thinking of right now.

I said “yes.”

New Kickstarter Incentive!

Our Pilot at the D Note!

Thanks to everyone for coming to our show on Oct. 3 — that was our best turnout, to date! We love when we have to find chairs and tables in the back for all of the interested audience members.

We are hard at work producing our first podcast, so if you missed the show rest assured that you can listen to it soon. Also, a huge thanks to Robin Munro, who painted live during our concert and donated the gorgeous work to our raffle — we’re already working to have him back for our Nov. 7 show. Speaking of, be sure to mark your calendars for Nov. 7, at 6 p.m., when we’re back on stage with “old, new, borrowed, blue.”

Telling Stories and Colorado Public Radio

Hello, Telling Stories fans:

We have some challenging news to share with you today. While we started our fourth season excited to be aired as a radio show on Colorado Public Radio, we recently found out that CPR no longer has the means to produce us as a full-length show. They are still generously going to promote our concerts.

We are still committed to producing our radio show as a podcast, though it will now be an independent venture! We are also taking steps to try to find a new home for our show, and we’d love to hear your ideas. In the meantime, if you’d like to offer us extra support as we take the independent road, please donate to our Kickstarter page!

Cheers,

Jennie

Telling Stories is Featured on Kickstarter!

This week we have $250 in matching donations — so the first $250 we get from you are matched dollar for dollar. Help us get to $500 this first week by donating now — we’re already at $100 (well, $200 with our matchers!) for our second day of fundraising!

Welcome to Season Four!

Welcome to the housewarming party for Telling Stories’ new website! We had some very nice digs previously (thanks, 303 Software!), but as we started to plan our biggest season ever, we decided we might need even more space and have even more interactivity to keep you up on all things Telling Stories.

If you are new to our concert series, check out our media page to hear some of our essayists read their works and our musicians perform.

We can’t wait any longer to tell you about our biggest news of the season — we’re going to be produced as a radio show by Colorado Public Radio! Which means that not only will we be played on the radio waves around Colorado, we’ll now have a very fancy podcast after each concert that we can share with our national and international listeners. (We expect to be huge in Japan.)

If you are anywhere near the Colorado area, then you really should come see one of our live shows — you can see a complete listing in our events calendar, where you can also peruse our previous concerts.

Not only are we doing our live performances and recording our radio show, but we’re also expanding our outreach — we’ll be guest lecturers in graduate and undergraduate music classes at the University of Colorado-Boulder, we’ll be performing at the New Frontiers Festival of New Music in Laramie, as well as offering a panel talk to the undergraduate music students at the University of Wyoming, and we’ll be hosting our annual Telling Stories’ Denver School of the Arts concert, where we bring together creative writing and music students to create their own interdisciplinary concert.

We couldn’t bring all this creative programming to you (especially in this economy!) without your support — please help us continue Telling Stories by donating here.

Check back often; Telling Stories will be blogging and tweeting about all of its performances here, as well as offering some behind-the-scenes looks at the freelance lifestyles of our writers and musicians. (Thank goodness for our beer sponsors.) And welcome to our new home!