Grant Category: Music
Shelter Music Boston
Boston, MA
Amount granted: $35,000
Grant year: 2023
Grant categories: Human Services, Music
$35,000 to support Shelter Music Boston’s Songs of Life Program.
Shelter Music Boston presents classical chamber music concerts of the highest
artistic standards in homeless shelters and other sheltering environments. Its goal is to promote community, creative interaction, respect, and therapeutic benefit. Songs of Life: Music Shared from Shelters and Other Program includes audiences in the composition of classical music performed for them. This new music reflects the viewpoints, experiences, and life challenges faced by those who are homeless and caught in related social, economic, and health problems. The goal of Songs of Life relates directly to a core tenet of its mission: to convey the essential dignity of its audiences and encourage them to be agents of change through its work and in their own lives.
Emmanuel Music
Boston, MA
Amount granted: $25,000
Grant year: 2022
Grant category: Music
$25,000 to jumpstart the new community engagement initiative “Musical Sanctuary”.
Through its performing, teaching, mentoring, and scholarly activities, Emmanuel Music occupies a unique niche: a living laboratory for the music of J. S. Bach. Emmanuel Music, founded in 1970, has served as the ensemble-in-residence for Boston’s Emmanuel Church for fifty years.
“Musical Sanctuary” will feature individual musicians rehearsing Bach in a casual, drop-in setting, with the doors always open so that it is clearly perceived as informal and available to all. Volunteers will invite passersby to sit and listen, and to come and go as they wish. Listeners are also welcomed to interact with the musician—or not. This is primarily about providing a safe place for reflection, connection, and respite—through the music of J. S. Bach.