2019 Festival

Patron Proposal

Additional Materials

Inside you will find additional information on

our festival's history, an in-depth look into our
2019 projects, and a look at our past work.
Our Story
Founding Chinquapin
After making his living in San Franscisco
remodeling victorian homes and as the senior
project manager of the Presidio, Steve
Radcliffe, a bluegrass boy from Pennsylvania,
moved to Southern Oregon's  Applegate
Valley.In 2012 he bought 40 woodland acres
and founded the Chinquapin Center for the
Arts. 

Steve's vision was to create a place where artists

of all disciplines could come and do deep,
focused work in a supportive environment of
calm and serenity. Now, outfitted with a
workshop, main house, rehearsal space, two
buildings for future artists' studios, a piano,
dance mirror, meadows, and a gorgeous half-
acre pond, Chinquapin is ready and open,
welcoming artists to come live and work.

Twin Heroes
In 2014 Steve met Alexander Vassos.
Fresh out of grad school Alex came to
Chinquapin for a seven-month residency,
completing major portions of his new opera,
The Fourth. Fast-forward to 2016 Alex
returned to Chinquapin with a team of 10
artists with homes ranging from the Rogue
Valley to Los Angeles and New York.
Together they founded the Twin Heroes
Summer Festival.

During Twin Heroes' two week residency

this team of directors, administrators,
musicians, vocalists, poets and composers
worked round the clock to realize excerpts
from The Fourth, alongside the poetry of
local spoken-word wizard Blaine Alexander
Lindsey and a new string quartet by Seven
Spillios, a  brilliant up and coming young
local composer. 
Our Second Season
Mission
In 2017, responding to our divided nation, we
would center our festival on the themes of
compassion and common ground, creating
events designed to strengthen community,
offering programming created to promote
compassionate thinking and communication. 
In 2017 the Twin Heroes Ensemble would
again return to Chinquapin for a full month
adding three new branches to our festival's
offerings.
Chamber music Now!
The first major programming addition was
our chamber music series. We presented
nine concerts to the community, featuring
the music of seven disparate composers with
their music woven together with compelling
spoken narratives about their lives designed
to accentuate the ability of music to
transcend circumstance. In keeping with our
commitment to young, local artists our
series culminated in a new piece for string
quartet and spoken word by Seven Spillios,
Transcend and Blaine Alexander Lindsay.

Queer Arts Festival

The second addition to the summer's program
was Transcend Queer Arts Festival.
Responding to the Rogue Valley's need for
inclusive queer spaces we brought the
community together presenting the work of 12
performers, actors, singers, visual artists, and
poets. Three separate spaces were opened to
the public presenting an evening's worth of art
and fun including performances, an art
exhibition and a dance party.

We Choose Love
The final addition to our festival was our We Choose Love
event, a concert honoring the journey of the Rogue
Valley's own hero, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche. On
the first day of Ramadan, Taliesin was killed while
defending two teen girls — one a Muslim wearing a hijab
— from a man shouting racist epithets on a train in
Portland. He died alongside Ricky John Best, a veteran of
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Though coming from
different sides of our country's political poles, these twin
heroes came together to stand for unity and compassion.
In an inspiring evening-long celebration the Twin Heroes
team came together with Taliesin's loved ones offering a
diverse program of musical selections, poems and
reflections on themes of love, unity, and compassion.
 Our Current Season
Rogue Arts Program
This season our chamber program will take a
different tack bringing in the talents of a range of
local musicians. We will continue our support of
young local composers programming their work
during our chamber series with commissioned
works. Finally, this season we will be adding a series
of Art Song concerts, presenting art songs and arias
to the public. This program will culminate with two
new song cycles featuring the music of Seven
Spillios and Alexander Vassos with text by Blaine
Alexander Lindsay.
Chinquapin
Summer Festival
And finally, after two years working with
one another, Twin Heroes and the
Chinquapin Center for the Arts will
officially tie the knot.  Building a permanent
festival here in the Rogue Valley we will
give support and voice to local artists, create
virtuosic forward-looking work, educate the
next generation of young musicians,
provide mindfulness training for our artists
and enrich the community for years to
come.

Listen to the Chinquapin Musicians now!

For the Accessible Opera Project (The Fourth), our first opera The House Is Open,
and our young composer in residence, Seven Schreck go to:

twinheroesproductions.com/media.php
2019 Proposed
Projects
 2019 Base-Level Project

Accessible Opera
Project: The Fourth

Opera's Access Problem

Rarified venues, a foreign language, unaffordable productions and an

army of "expert" musicians.

Why is it that this set of parameters has somehow become the unspoken
rules for what makes opera, well...opera?

Here at the Chinquapin Center for the Arts, we are developing a new
repertory of operas that can truly move operatic thinking into our age,
and by this effort make it more resonant, relevant, available and thus
accessible.

Creating Access: Our Principles

Three guiding principals help us to modernize and bring opera

forward:

1. Modern Forces – bringing the sonic world of opera up into the

now
2. Mobile and Affordable Productions – bringing opera within reach
3. Contemporary Themes – finding operatic intensity and
timelessness in english and with modern themes

From inception to production, these four prinicpals guide us in

creating exquisite, complex and virtuosic operas that – get this, are by
their very nature accessible.

First, let's tour through are three principles, showing how they work to
create modern, accessible, virtuosic opera for our age. Then we can
look at The Fourth, an opera project we have had in development for
three years, a project you can help us bring into the world.

Let's begin!
 Our Principals
1. Modern Forces

Opera has always been the most formidable of forms:

The most powerful voices, the biggest of orchestras, the most spectacular and
wrenching dramas. Opera has always been, and will always be, the medium of
intensities.  Yet, why is it that the most intense, incisive and immersive
instrument available to us today, the instrument truly of our times is all but
absent from the medium?

What is this absent instrument?...  The electronic speaker.

The speaker is the main and most ubiquitous way we receive aural art and
information today. Can you imagine the contemporary world without it? We
live our lives through these instruments: cellphones, TV, YouTube, the stereo
in your car, dance music, an amplified band, music piped into a  bar... we
often listen to our favorite masterpieces from the other side of one of these
tools.

And yet in typical, reflexive, antiquarian fashion contemporary opera insists

on shying away from this primary and potent mode of modern aural
communication.

Our thought here at the Chinquapin Center for the Arts is not about simply
discarding live musicians for synthesizers or simulating an old form without
regard to the specific needs of the newcomer. We approach the speaker with
the same degree of finesse, creativity and mastery that any traditional
composer would treat a newcomer, be it clarinet, castrato or celesta.

This is not about doing away with our masterful group of classical players
either. We make our expert group acoustic virtuosi louder and wilder – raising
them up to the sonic level of an orchestra and then weave them into the
overwhelming, and now fully immersive orchestral world of electronic sound.

We do not simplify – we do not dumb down – we approach our electronic

sound and the scheme for amplification with the same eye, ear, heart and
mind that any traditional master would have applied to new arrivals to the
medium.

At Chinquapin, we create operas that not only use amplified forces and
electronic sounds but we structure our operas from conception,
to inception and to execution around using these modern sounds.
 Creating Access:
Our
OurPrincipals
Principals
2. Mobile and Affordable
    Productions

For the future of opera it is essential to make it affordable. At the Chinquapin

Center for the Arts we design productions that can be moved into
unexpected, affordable and accessible venues, always without sacrificing the
artistic integrity of each piece.

Amplification and an abundance of electronic sounds allow our chamber

group of virtuoso musicians to achieve a complexity of compositional
thought and sonic heft can rival traditional operatic means.

Each one of our group of musicians is a virtuoso. Working as a nimble

ensemble (like a rock band or a traveling theater troupe) they can easily tour
to unexpected and inviting venues...venues that open the doors of opera to
whole new groups of people...venues that cost significantly less. Our
numbers help create the focus and intensity of chamber music, while at the
same time drastically lowering ticket prices.

Our team of designers and our director create productions that move quickly
from space to space. We don't have to wait; we can bring opera to the people.
We can go into schools, churches, wineries or theaters, bringing opera to
places that might attract those that would never think to seek the medium
out; our productions seek the audience.

Quickly, within the course of an hour's sound-check our sound designer can
make the work sound polished, full and powerful despite the acoustic
properties of any given space.
At the drop of a had our ingenious minimalist sets and portable lighting rigs
transform any space and fully create the theatrical experience.

Here at Chinquapin, we create operas that are entirely built around

these distinctly contemporary forces, forces that travel, bringing
affordable and genuinely operatic productions to
entirely new constituencies.
 Our Principals
3. Contemporary Themes

Think about the stories of our age: Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Arrested
Development, 30 Rock, and The Handmaids Tale. These are not stories made in a
time when people need less intensity, depth or sophistication. We are living in a
golden age of provocative and sophisticated storytelling. We at Chinquapin are
to creating operas that are for this audience. Operas that are of our time.
of
We create characters of depth and complexity. Characters that transform and
develop. Characters that are as compelling and alive as the music they sing.
Hackneyed operatic caricature is not in our repertoire.

The Accessible Opera Project creates dramatically attuned work. Dramatic pacing is
never sacrificed for musical structure. Musicality is never eschewed for the sake of
drama. We create works that thrive in the sweet spot of perfect music-drama.

So far, the Chinquapin team has created two such English-language stories, stories
st that capture, with operatic intensity the stories and themes of our times.  Just as La
Bohème was a modern story in it's time, at Chinquapin we are focused on creating an
repertory on contemporary themes. A repertory that can bring the spiritual intensity
of opera into the now.

Let's talk about one of these stories now: The Fourth

 2019 Base-Level Project

THE
FOURTH

INTRODUCTION
In development at the Chinquapin Center since 2016, The Fourth
embodies a significant advance for the operatic medium. Sitting at the
cross roads, between instrumental and electronic forces, between natural
and urban worlds, The Fourth is written in homage to the natural beauty,
spiritual ethos and culture of environmental stewardship so alive in
Southern Oregon.

Sonically, philosophically and thematically The Fourth is imbued with the

sounds and spirit of the natural world. The Fourth helps us examine our
relationship to the environment and to the deepest and most unfettered
facets of the self.

THE STORY
A fatal diagnosis. A few months left. The action begins.

In a kind of final gesture, our protagonists, Gus Turnwheel implores his

sister Kate and her husband Michael, the assistant to an important
architect to journey out of the of the city and into the jungle in search of
Kate and Gus' long lost mother - a monolith from the past who's very
existence falls deeper into question as they plunge into the wild.

The jungle shakes off the deep-laid structures of their lives as they travel,
bringing them into a harsh awareness, where long-buried tensions are
made clear. Kate faces the secret well of sadness springing from the loss of
an unborn child. Against the perfection of nature's design, Michael faces
his obsession as an architect; while Gus, amongst the jungle's profusion of
life confronts his mortality.
EASTERN THOUGHT
Drawn from the same waters as the teachings of Joseph Campbell, Osho,
Gautama Buddha and Lao Tzu, The Fourth thrums with an eastern energy.
Carrying us away from the city's buzz and into the jungles heart, The Fourth
unfolds like a meditation. 

Our three characters, Michael, Kate and Gus each embody a part of this
spiritual deepening. The ingenious and impassioned Michael carries the
torch of the mind. Deep, wise and wounded, Kate is the holds the emotional
heartbeat of the story. While Gus, preparing to leave his body, physically
carries the narrative to it's end.

THE BARDO
Once the spirit has left the body it is said to go to an in-between place lying
between one death and the next incarnation. The Tibetans call this place of
terrors and trials, the Bardo. For our three heroes, the jungle is just such a
world.

For an architecht that spends his life anylyzing and theorizing on how to
craft the perfect urban environment, the thoughtless perfection of the
jungle rips Michael open to a new understanding of what makes an
environment truly alive.

Pregnant again, Kate lives every day under a shroud of trauma left by the
passing of her unborn child. Literally between death and birth, Kate must
face a desperate web of emotions, let go, and make room for her next child.

Finally, Gus – pulling the story ever-deeper into the wilds – will let go of
absolutely everything to face his death.
AN ENVIRONMENTAL ORCHESTERA

As our three heroes leave the clamor of the city and journey into the
jungle's deep, each scene of the opera brings us into an increasingly wild
environment. Used like instruments, recordings of these environments
are embedded into the music and the plot.

These sounds treat each new world precisely like an environmental

instrument. With great specificity and detail these samples have been
taken, spliced, harmonized, composed, crafted and made rhythmic. This
environmental instrument not only plays along with the musicians, not
only accompanies the singers, but also immerses the audience from all
four sides in natural and environmental sound. It's as though we are
transported into each new world and the world itself is singing!

Like a great sonic set piece, there are melodies made from bird song...
harmonies hewn from the wind... a xylophone of drip-drops as the trio
travels through a cave... cars, machinery, horns, boats, bells and broken
glass. This rainbow of sounds not only provide music and setting but the
sounds of animals appear, swirl around the audience, interact with our
characters and give shape to the plot.

The constant influence of these sounds creates a deep symbolic dialectic

between Environment, Music and Plot. As the three journey out of the
city and come into contact with their deeper selves, the environmental
instrument becomes increasingly savage and wild. Like visual symbolism
in a novel, each environment creates a deep layer of poetic resonance
between the story, the characters and the deeper meaning of
Environment.
 OUR WORK SO FAR

The Fourth has been in development at the Chinquapin Center for the
Arts since 2015 when our composer-in-residence came to the
Chinquapin Center to complete major portions of the work.  In 2016
the Twin Heroes Ensemble would come to Chinquapin for the first
time, performing and recording selections of the work.

We need your help to take our next step towards touching audiences
and bringing The Fourth to life.

2019 AND BEYOND

During our 2019 Summer Festival The Chinquapin musicians will
workshop, present and record a full concert version of this opera
getting ready for a fully staged 2020 premier. In 2020, joined by our
brilliant team of designers and directors we will present the work to
the public. After it's Rogue Valley Premier the work will go on to tour
new and unexpected venues throughout Oregon, venues that will open
opera up to new audiences. Finally, after our Oregon tour we will
present our production of The Fourth in New York City.

Listen to excerpts from The Fourth now at:

twinheroesproductions.com/projects/nsteo.php
 2019 Base-Level Project

Chamber Music
Now!

Making Chamber Music 'Now'

Chamber music comes from a time where
iTunes wasn't a button's push away. The iTunes
of the day happened to be your family, friends
and the abundance of skilled musicians you
knew. What we know as 'chamber music' today
was specifically written for to be played "in the
chamber," right in your own home, with friends.

At Chinquapin we recognize music as an

inherantly social activity and so it is our goal
to clear away the formal  'museum
atmosphere' that has calcified around
classical music.We seek to make our concerts
as live and as energetic, as the powerful and
dynamic as the music we present up on the
stage.

We perform in unexpected venues. We

comission young and local composers. We
feature Chinquapin visual artists in our lobbies.
Our players socialize with patrons after every
concert. We hire charismatic virtuosi that talk
movingly about their work. We contextualize
classical composers in ways that make their
work relevant and live. We activly make
chamber music as vivacious and social as the
popular music traditions of our time. 

In 2017 the Chinquapin Musicians returned to

the Chinquapin Center for the Arts and
presented a full month of brilliant chamber
music concerts. In keeping with the
overarching theme of our season
'Compassion and Commmon Ground' we
created three signature programs entitled
The Compassion Concerts.
 2019 Stretch Project
CLASSES AT CHINQUAPIN
Workshop for Young Composers
and String Players

About
In addition to being tremendous artists, the Chinquapin Ensemble musicians have
extensive experience and passion for education. In the next two years, our dream is to
offer a summer music program alongside our month-long festival. In addition to providing
powerful cultural experiences, we can educate the next generation of composers, string
players, pianists and vocalists. 

Plot
2019-20
In 2019 or 20 we have two pilot programs planned for young composers and string players
in the Rogue Valley. We hope to build on this pilot program in years to come, expanding
over time, educating more young musicians in more disciplines as the festival matures.

Strings
The first of our two pilot programs will be our Workshop for Young String Players. In
its first year, four young string players (violin, viola and cello, age 16 
and up) will join us twice a week for a month at the Chinquapin Center for the Arts. They will be given
individual lessons and chamber music coaching by the Chinquapin Quartet.  Students will be matched
with one another to prepare a work of chamber music from the classical repertoire. Students will also
work with our staff accompanist and prepare a solo work. All music prepared during the workshop will
be performed in our showcase at the end of the three weeks.

Composers The second program we hope to offer will be our Workshop for Young
Composers. A group of young composers (age 16 and up) will be invited
to compose pieces for resident artists to rehearse, workshop and critique in masterclasses. Pieces will
be performed by the Chinquapin Musicians in our final showcase; recordings will made. The
opportunity for a young composer to hear their work realized by masterful musicians gives them
invaluable experience; the recordings will give them tangible material they can then use to jump-start
their careers and take their compositions to the next level.

The Future As The Chinquapin Center and Festival mature, we hope to expand this
program and devote intensive and uninterrupted periods of our 
residency to education. As our facilities develop, we hope to house our young artists
on-site, giving them a focused, intense, summer camp-like experience. In the future we
will expand our offerings to include vocalists and also offer our young composers
composition lessons during their stay.
Past Work
 The Compassion Concerts

Presenting three signature programs throughout the

Rogue Valley, we sought to create performance
experiences to expose our audience to new and classic
repertoire, and to bring composers' histories to life while
using chamber music to participate in a national
conversation.

The first of these concerts wove masterpieces from the

string quartet repertoire with stirring biographical
narratives. Using this concert as a lens we focused the
evening on themes of common ground and music's ability
to transcend the circumstance.

FEATURED COMPOSERS:
Though beginning his career as a staunch Czech nationalist
composer, Dvořák famously emigrated to America in 1892
and to write some of the most stirring pieces of devotion
to the American spirit. Our second composer,
Mendelssohn, a German Jew from an aristocratic family
who later converted to Protestantism and undertook the
revival of the music of one of the most important
Christian composers: J. S. Bach. Britten, a queer composer
and a trail-blazer during a time in which gay rights weren’t
even on the radar, lived and worked closely with his life
partner, the tenor Peter Pears. Britten fought tirelessly for
recognition, eventually earning his place in conservative
British society and becoming a celebrated national hero
(Pears would receive a note of condolence from the Queen
at Britten’s death). Despite differences in background,
nationality, religion and sexual orientation, these
composers and their music have transcended their unique
struggles to bring audiences together. In the Compassion
Concerts, the common ground of the string quartet would
allow us to explore ideas of identity, hope, and
compassion.

On our second concert we presented a wide selection of

duos throughout the Rogue Valley aimed at opening up
ears to boundary-pushing work, including Arvo Pärt, Bela
Bartok and one of Benjamin Britten's more challenging
works, the Lachrymae.  Along with this concert we
presented the visual art of local artist, Grace O'Neil.

For the final concert of our series we sought to use our

gifts to give back to our community and participate in a
national conversation around prejudice and islamophobia.
This event 'We Choose Love', would honor the journey of
the Rogue Valley's own hero, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-
Meche. More can be read on page, "We Choose Love".

Listen to the Chinquapin Musicians now at twinheroesproductions.com/media.php

COMPASSION; COMMON GROUND

We ended our 2017 'Compassion and Common Ground'

season, by giving thanks to our community and
honoring our Rogue Valley hero, Taliesin Myrddin
Namkai-Meche.
On the first day of Ramadan, Taliesin was killed while
defending two teen girls — one a Muslim wearing a hijab
— from a man shouting racist epithets on a train in
Portland. He died alongside Ricky John Best, a veteran of
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Though these two
came from different sides of our country's political
poles, these twin heroes came together in a selfless
moment.

New Local Work

So moved by Taliesin, we would commission a

collaboration on the theme of compassion between two
local artists, spoken-word wizard Blaine Alexander
Lindsay, and celebrated young composer, Seven
Schreck entitled The Turning of the Page.  Alongside
Blaine's stirring renditions of Taliesin's own poetry,
The Turning of the Page was brought to life by Blaine
and the Chinquapin Ensemble.

We Choose Love

In partnership with Asha Deliverance,

Taliesin's mother, and the movement she
terms "We Choose Love", we presented two
uplifting and transformational concerts of
music and poetry honoring Taliesin's life
and the spirit of compassion which he
embodied.

Performers included New York-based artists,

soprano Danielle Buonaiuto, tenor Justin
Montalvo, violist Brandon Gianetto, violinists
Emily Frederick and Lauren Jenkins, Ashland
cellist Michal Palzewicz and pianist Naseer
Ashram, joined by Taliesin's loved ones, sharing
reflections, thoughts and poems throughout a
this memorableand moving night.
Mission
With the uniting belief that the common ground of
love can exist between all people, and that gender
roles need no longer divide us, Twin Heroes
brought our community together for an evening-
long celebration of Queer Art. In this exploration on
the themes of Masculinity, Femininity the Sacred,
the Artful and the Profane we would present the
work of 12 local queer artists of various disciplines
to the community.

Community
Responding to the Rogue Valley's need for
queer spaces we designed an atmosphere
made to promote socialization and
communication around and about our
queer art. Alongside performances and
exhibitions we offered a dance party,
talkback sessions with our artists, as well as
facilitated conversations with community
leaders all centered around queer issues. 

Creating a Queer Arts History

One of our big ambitions for the evening was to place our
12 local artists alongside the work of major historical artists
that have added gender diversity and have queered arts
history.

We played the work of Hildegarde von Bingen, the 11th

century abbess, composer and polymath. Though the
canon of classical music is an overwhelmingly male-
dominated field, her work would lay an important and
enduring cornerstone at the earliest moment in this
tradition. 

Secondly, we programmed Destruction and Desire, a one-man version of Oscar

Wilde's Salome. In this work, a young girl's desires lead to the destruction of
both her and her beloved obsession. The Salome story touches on the deep
link in queer life between love and death. Whether through persecution
throughout history or later during the terror of the AIDS crisis, the queer path
to love has been perilous.  Wilde himself was openly gay at a time when it was
unheard of. Wilde faced fierce persecution, leading eventually to his death.

Finally, we featured Benjamin Britten's Three Divertimenti. Britten is one of the

Queer Movement's biggest early success stories. Britten became a household
name in the 50s and 60s England. The queen herself sent his life-long partner
a note of condolence at Britten's death. The work, originally titled Playboy,
Play, was written as a portrait of three men in Britten's life. 
Queer Arts
Gallery

Fool'isha

Grace O'Neil

Aphasia
 The House Is Open is an electro-acoustic opera in two acts
about Charley, a young boy who has spent the
majority of his life asleep and in dreams.

Plot
The first act follows Charley's waking and his increasingly perilous re-
introduction to his family. Beginning almost as a children's opera The
House Is Open soon twists in on itself; Charley's parents transform from
kindly homemaker/breadwinner stereotypes into monolithic earth-
mother/sky-father archetypes; his sister, Sophia reveals a passionate
and incestuous determination; and The Man, the sinister agent of
society's hand, makes visitation on the boy.

Departing from a straightforward, waking narrative, the second act

becomes a surreal dream-portrait of family, society and sexual
awakening. In the second act we watch through Charley's closed eyes
as the boy is drawn back into dreams, pulling his family with him into
the abyss.

Groundbreaking Electronic Worlds

The House Is Open lives between two sonic worlds: the acoustic world that
accompanies the waking parts of the drama and a crushing surround-
sound speaker system that envelops the audience in the nightmarish
electronic sound as the psychological, dream element comes to
dominate.
This combination of acoustic and electronic forces
marks a major step forward for the operatic genre.
The two sonic worlds viscerally serve the drama; the
electronic sound envelops the audience and plunges
us into Charley's internal world while the orchestral
sound, sound that is perhaps, more distant, sound
that only comes from the front is heard as the sound
of the external, waking world.

Listen to excerpts from The House Is Open now at:

twinheroesproductions.com/projects/thio.php