Experience Awesome!

March 21, 2011

Have you experienced awesomeness? Well Experience Counterpoint might get you close.

They’re a guerrilla chamber orchestra dedicated to pushing the boundaries of classical music and performance art who won the March DC Awesome grant for their project “Audio Warhol”. We hope that with our support, Experience CounterPoint can bring their next exciting performance to a wider audience to experience awesomeness!

You can listen to some of Counterpoint’s work here: http://www.experiencecounterpoint.org/experience/listen.html

Here’s what they had to say about winning the Awesome Foundation Grant:

Winning the Awesome Foundation DC grant is something that couldn’t come at a better time for us.  We have recently finished a few amazing events, but we are still bursting with innovative ideas!  While we would love to not have to think about it, money is definitely a major concern when we are creating and executing a project.  This grant will help us bring to life one of our new projects: Audio Warhol. The Awesome Foundation’s support will help spur an exciting and artistically sophisticated experience for both the audience and CounterPoint to enjoy.  It will be truly Awesome and we can’t wait to plan it.

CounterPoint is about inclusion, bringing music and art to all people.  As in Warhol’s art, much of the music that classical musicians perform is very conceptually sophisticated and can be either intimidating or perceived as elitist.  Our goal as an organization in this project is to bring the wonderful and exciting emotions and thoughts that drive this usually inaccessible music and art into an arena that makes it much more accessible (and relevant) to the average person.  As musicians, we are trained to understand why and how the music we play is relevant to our society.

We want to bring that relevance of music and art to people in an open and exciting manner that helps them experience it in a memorable way as well.  We want to communicate with people, and we want to make sure that we are able to do that without any sense of exclusion.  We don’t want people to be scared off when they see violins, violas, cellos, and basses!

We hope that this project will bring more of an awareness to arts in DC and how they other DC organizations can be more exciting and spontaneous.  

How can you help Experience Counterpoint be more awesome?

They need more financial support. Visit their site www.experiencecounterpoint.org, contact them at info@experiencecounterpoint.org, book them for shows, etc.

And finally, if you’re thinking of applying for an awesome grant, the Counterpointers have some advice for you some advice for you:

The thoughts that guided us while applying for this grant seem to mirror much of the spirit of the Awesome Foundation.  We have a commitment to bring music and art to the community, but we also want to make sure that is accessible to all people.  We also want to make sure that our organization can use its platform to highlight causes that need the public’s help.  So in this way, we would suggest that  people applying for the Awesome Foundation Grant should highlight not only what they do as an organization that is creative, but also what they have done with their creativity that has helped communities and causes that deserve the public’s attention.