My Desire is to…
…create an independent phrontistery of musical study and art making that is peaceful, calm, and positive; that serves people’s need to be valued and accepted while honoring their individual hopes through meaningful musical experiences of performance, study, and composition; that gives people help, support, inspiration, and wonder in their own engagements with music; that brings focus and definition to a diciplined way of life in musical art; that has a purposeful presence in community; that has a rigid curriculum of clarity, rooted in the history and tradition of generous folk performance; that incites and provokes the attentive process of creation in the deepening and ever sacred present; that provides the freedom to amplify confident curiosity in the making of musical artifacts; that is opposed to and disinterested in shame, guilt, career, contest, judgement, grades, and “professional” egotism.
My oath…
…declares a devotion of gratitude with patient attention; to observe, learn of, and celebrate every participants’ individual skills, talents, abilities and unique voice in their creative expression though the art form; to stay out of the way, in a commitment to honor the freedom that only the art form inculcates; to help participants recognize that the beauty in the creative act is experienced through their own relationship with the discipline of the art form and is available for a lifetime of joy, perseverance, work, serendipity, manifestation, and development; to be sensitive, as this relationship with the art form will change over time as they change and grow over time; to model that fulfillment is found in the dedicated work of making, not in success, approval, accolades, or fame; to live in gratitude for the ability and opportunity to be made through the making of artifacts, as this is the humble source of all genuine artistic expression.