Chamber Project Saint Louis musicians Elizabeth Ramos and Laura Reycraft. Photo by Brandon Krepel.
This Sunday, Chamber Project Saint Louis will celebrate 15 seasons of intimate, inclusive chamber music concerts with a performance at Schlafly Tap Room. Executive director Dana Hotle has been part of the project since the beginning, when the project was simply a scrappy group of women who longed to perform pieces they’d never gotten a chance to before. These days, Chamber Project Saint Louis is an established piece of the music community, but they’re still dedicated to highlighting underrepresented voices and sharing their love of chamber music with audiences across the city.
Ahead of the 15th anniversary celebration, we caught up with Hotle to reflect on how far Chamber Project Saint Louis has come and learn more about this weekend’s exciting program.
How did Chamber Project Saint Louis first get started?
We started as a group of young musicians hanging out and socializing. We started talking about a specific piece of music that we all really liked and hadn't had a chance to play. And we were like, “Well, let's do it. Let's put on a concert.” And so that's how it got started. But as we began to really dig into what we wanted to do with presenting concerts, it was really clear that we wanted to do something different from what the traditional chamber music concerts have become. Usually you come in and you go to a concert hall and you sit down and everybody claps and the right times—and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that tradition—but we felt that we could update that a little bit. The two things that we were really passionate about, and still are, were really creating an event or an evening that people who haven't ever come to a concert would feel really welcome at and throwing open those doors to anyone to come to a classical music concert…how do we bring in the elusive new audience? Part of bringing in that new audience is presenting music that represents our community, that represents us. You walk in and you see yourself on the stage somehow in the music that's being played, or the stories that are being told along with the music, or other people on stage. We're a woman-led organization and we have a ridiculous amount of music degrees between us. Everyone on stage has at least two degrees in music, and some have three. I went through six years of education at elite music schools and played a piece of music by a woman and probably none by a person of color. And that's not who we are. That's not who's out there. We want to see ourselves, hear ourselves. So that was also a big piece of what we wanted to do and have successfully done as an organization.
What would you say is the mission of Chamber Project Saint Louis?
Our mission and our goal is to create community-centered, community-focused events that are inclusive to the community and to who's on stage and who's being presented. Our concerts are narrated, they're themed, and they're each in a different concert venue. It's really a different concert experience from a traditional chamber music concert experience.
What value do you think chamber music brings to a modern audience?
I think chamber music offers an experience of community and intimacy. You're not in a big concert hall. You are sitting five or 10 feet away from the musicians. Sometimes you get to know the musicians, you get to know your fellow audience members. The art form itself is very intimate because it's a very small ensemble. You hear everything. You see everything. Orchestra concerts or any kind of concert where there's thousands of people there, that's one really awesome thing. And this is kind of the other end. It's like the black box theater of music. And our audience, they really appreciate that closeness. People feel like they belong there, it gives them a sense of community, and they get to experience really great art, which is in and of itself a really cathartic experience.
So you've been doing this for 15 seasons now. What has changed, or how has the project grown?
We've grown a lot. We really started as a group of friends just putting on concerts and scrapping it together. Now we're really an established institution in the area with wonderful donors and grants and all of that. We've changed in that we now, every year, we present a commissioning project. We've commissioned 15 pieces of music by local area composers, which links us directly to our community. The commissioning project has been a really big growth piece for us. We're also growing in our open rehearsals, which is an educational component through our partnership with the the St. Louis County Library. We also have a ton of other partnerships with other organizations outside of the classical music field, like the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Missouri History Museum, and several universities.
I'll say one other thing that has changed is that, when we started, there was absolutely no one doing the programming that we were doing in terms of putting a woman on every program and putting a person of color in every program. These groups are historically excluded. In their months, February and March, you would get these kind of token performances. So we were like, We're not going to do that. We have been very intentional for a long time about being very inclusive in every single concert that we present. And now we're really starting to see the industry begin to be like, "Oh, that works. We should do that." So that's really exciting.
I’ve had a lot of recent conversations about bringing new voices into art spaces and making programming more reflective of the community. There’s a lot of folks putting effort toward making that happen right now.
There is. And I feel like we're evidence that it works. People want to hear it. We're bringing in new voices. We're also bringing in voices that were left behind, that should have been in the history books. It's exciting to see this incremental change. We just want everybody to look at us. We did it. You can do it, too.
Over the course of these 15 seasons, what are you most proud of?
I am most proud of the community we have built of musicians and composers and fans, the people who come to our concerts. It's really a community, and we've done it in a really different way from what the industry tells you about how you should do it. We took a lot of risks together. Our audience has been cheering us on from the start…but our musicians have had to take a lot of risks. Our audience has been there for us, our donors, especially through the pandemic. I mean it's just really a community, and I'm really proud of that. We're all really proud of that.
You have a 15th anniversary concert coming up here at Schlafly Tap Room. Tell me a little bit about this program and what you're gonna be putting on for folks.
We're really excited about this program. We started rehearsing this past weekend and it already sounds great, so we're really excited. All of our concerts are themed, and they all kind of have a narrative that ties all the pieces together. Sometimes those are fun or they're rather serious, but this theme is “celebrate.” And what we're doing is bringing back pieces we've loved playing over the past 15 years that really have a special place in our hearts and also really represent the pillars of our organization. We're going to bring back one of our earlier commissions that we only were able to perform once when we commissioned it, which is by Zac Cairns. We're playing one of his pieces and one of our founding members, who’s since moved away, is going to come back and play that piece with us.
We’re playing gorgeous, lush French music by Ravel. We're playing music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who was an Afro-British composer. We're bringing back all this stuff. Valerie Coleman, who's a favorite composer of ours, we've been playing her from the start. We're playing her music. So it's pieces that are close to our hearts and also represent the work we've done.
Can you tell me more about the commissioned piece you’ll be breaking out?
So the commission is called “Passing Through,” and it was written in 2017…the theme for the concert he wrote for was called “Blueprint.” And we took a different take on all the different ways the word “blueprint” could be used. He took it really literally and went and looked at the blueprints for the Gateway Arch. He used some of the math that was necessary to build the Arch—hopefully he will explain this better than I can at the concert, because he will be there— but he used some of that math to give him the parameters to compose the piece. And the piece itself is constructed in a musical arch.
What is it that you most want people to know about Chamber Project St. Louis?
You're so, so welcome to come. We want you there, and if you've never been to a concert, this is the place for you. If you played the flute in middle school and you kind of miss it, but you don't know where to start, we are for you. It's really friendly. Everyone's happy to be there, and it's a very welcoming, inviting place for everyone.
