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 an indelible 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 Moment;
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.
– JC Heisler