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Wow... my wife and I finally finished our crazily busy concert and recital month... and now we have a couple of weeks of "rest"!

Our ensemble gave the last concert in our main series for 2024... and it seemed to go down well with one of the largest audiences that we have pulled! And after the concert, there was a decent review, good feedback from audience and guest musicians, and a FLURRY of donations!

Honestly, both my wife and I are crazily grateful and honoured that people believe enough in our vision that the they donate towards the ensemble... but at the same time, we get quite nervous about the responsibility of carrying through on what people might hope for the ensemble!

Thankfully, we don't have to deal with a "business" orientated board... with a conscious choice to remain light and heavily artist focussed... which means that we don't have to do too much with "non-music" concerns! And from what I hear from other ensembles, this is a huge blessing... but we pay for it in the lack of administration and other skills that a board would normally give... and sometimes, that means that we don't have such direct access to interested "philanthropy". But that is okay... we run light, so we don't need lots to survive and thrive (unlike other groups...), and so we can slowly grow our support base over time instead of trying to rely on a single huge donor.

... and again, decentralised (haha...) support is better than a single support base!

But even as people were walking in... before we had even finished our 2024 series, we already had requests for booking tickets in our 2025 series! Haha... a great problem to have, but we have only just locked in dates, venue, and guests for that year... and then we sat down to focus on finishing 2024!

... and so, this week, we will get the back-end infrastructure in place for our 2025 series up and running, and then start the physical publicity campaign (postcard distribution)... and then we need to come up with concert titles and publicity images for the individual concerts. That is what our 2 weeks of "rest" is for! At the concert, I apologised for not having all of that up yet... but I did promise that it would be up by the end of the month!

At least the year publicity is ready to go... but the website now needs some serious updating and streamlining... sigh... heads down!

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