29 Jun Press Release: $15,000 NEA Grant for SalonEra Season 4
LES DÉLICES TO RECEIVE $15,000 GRANT FROM THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS
Cleveland, OH – Les Délices has been approved for a $15,000 Grant for the Arts Project Award from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support SalonEra’s fourth season in 2023-24. SalonEra is an award-winning early music webseries and podcast that highlights the work of a diverse range of musicians and historians and serves a global audience of classical music enthusiasts. Produced under the aegis of Les Délices, SalonEra is free to enjoy and is made possible by support from individual donors and foundations.
SalonEra is among 1,130 projects across the country, totaling more than $31 million, that were selected during this second round of Grants for Arts Projects fiscal year 2023 funding.
“The National Endowment for the Arts is pleased to support a wide range of projects, including Les Délices’ SalonEra, demonstrating the many ways the arts enrich our lives and contribute to healthy and thriving communities,” said NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. “These organizations play an important role in advancing the creative vitality of our nation and helping to ensure that all people can benefit from arts, culture, and design.”
Les Délices Artistic Director Debra Nagy commented, “We’re incredibly honored to receive this support and recognition for SalonEra from the NEA, which enables us to continue to evolve the program in interesting ways post-pandemic. In particular, we’ll expand our reach to new audiences through continuation of our audio podcast series. We are also shifting our production model to prioritize on-location capture around the country. SalonEra was created during the pandemic, when recording artist interviews and performances remotely was the only option. While we remain very proud of the remotely-produced episodes and musical performances of past seasons, we look forward to creating a fresh look and feel for the 7 episodes in our 4th season.” Executive Director Laura Potter added, “We’ll also introduce new programming in Cleveland called SalonEra Sessions that will let live audiences be a part of SalonEra experience for the first time. It’s all part of a very exciting 15th Anniversary Season for Les Délices.” SalonEra will announce the details of its 4th season later this summer.
Since September 2020, SalonEra has premiered 35 original episodes, 80 remote musical collaborations, and created feature opportunities and paid micro-engagements for over 75 artists. Free of geographic or conventional programming limitations, each one-hour episode is guided instead by the personalities, perspectives, and contributions of special guests. Guests share recent or upcoming work in alternating interview and performance segments that highlight personal stories, address inspiration and artistic process, and explore intersections between music and art through history. Past episodes have featured insights from living composers who utilize historical compositional techniques, queer artists who find a sense of belonging in baroque opera, an homage to 17th-cent. Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, art songs by Schubert, a deep-dive into the technological shifts of the turn of the 16th century, folk-infused Baroque music from Scotland, and much more. Frequent guest and collaborator violinist Karin Cuellar-Rendon remarked, “I found it invaluable that in a series where canonic composers were showcased, such topics as Indigenous Music and Latin American Baroque Music were also presented. The episodes were sensitively curated portraying these musics in a respectful manner, far from the frames of exoticism, heritage and unfair comparisons which in the past have negated them the same attention and respect other western repertoire benefits from.”
All episodes from SalonEra’s 3rd season remain available to stream on our YouTube channel until June 30, 2023. Podcast versions of these episodes are available on all platforms in perpetuity. Les Délices’ other outreach initiatives include Early Music Explorations (a video enrichment series for students in grades 3-7) and Music Meditations (a podcast and telephone hotline combining archival performances, poetry, and prompts for guided listening). Visit www.salonera.org and www.lesdelices.org/outreach to learn more.
About NEA’s Grants for Arts Projects:
Grants for Arts Projects (GAP) is the National Endowment for the Arts’ largest grants program for organizations. Matching grants range from $10,000 to $100,000, and are recommended for organizations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. In July 2022, 1,927 eligible applications were received requesting more than $98 million in FY23 support. This round, 1,129 projects are approved for funding totaling more than $31 million.
Project-based funding will support opportunities for public engagement with the arts and arts education, the integration of the arts with strategies that promote the health and well-being of people and communities, and the improvement of overall capacity and capabilities within the arts sector.
Through this grant category, the NEA provides comprehensive and expansive funding for communities across a variety of artistic disciplines and fields.