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Hi,

This is rather different from the normal threads we get to this teachers forum, but I thought that many of you don't actually follow other PianoWorld forums that closely, and I would like to let you know about a project/campaign of mine.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2925155/beauty-and-hope-in-the-21st-century

This is a kickstater campaign (meaning that I'm hope to have it crowd funded, under the term that the goal (10,000 GBP) must be reached by the 4th of March).

I strongly believe in this project, for many reasons:

• The art is wonderful!
• The music is currently being composed, but from what I've heard it's also wonderful!
• The idea behind the project (Beauty & Hope in the 21st century) is something that's as contemporary as it can be, and remains artful, while at the same time making a comment about today's world, from a social and political, even, point of view.
• I'm eagerly waiting to start producing and editing all the products, knowing that the results will be stunning! (those who've seen the scores that I publish, I hope can relate to what I'm saying).

In any case I hope that in the next 11-12 days I will be able to reach the goal!

Thank you.

For any questions feel free to post here, or in the kickstarter page, or anywhere else you might feel is relevant.

Nikolas

EDIT: If you want you can check out the 9 illustrations here: http://www.beautyandhope.portfoliobox.me/

This sounds wonderful! I just finished reading a story about one of our Canadian Olympic athletes, whose funding was pulled because of an injury, but she managed to pay her own way to the Olympics through a Kickerstarter campaign. So why not crowd-fund the arts?

Thank you LadyChen.

You see, since I launched the publishing house, I've been actively trying to find ways to keep it going, while remaining 100% independent! I will be outright honest to say that the arts have been dependent of outside funding for far too long. And I feel that this is part of the reason why a lot of orchestras are closing down, etc.

The 'commercial' element is missing in a lot of occasions!

So for me crowd funding is brilliant, because it allows me to go the extra mile with a project, which otherwise would be... more pale, but also still remain independent and believing in the actual value of the "products". Cause in the end this is what it's all about: Being able to sell what you make. Profit, etc, come in second at this point for me, but the fact that I might actually be able to build such an amazing project, makes me want to fly!

________________________________________

For anyone interested... It's 9 days since the deadline and we're closing in at almost 50% of the funds gathered! £4,395 are already in.

Nikolas, can you give us some idea of the difficulty level of the compositions? Will these be at the level of early or intermediate students, or will they be advanced works that piano teachers might have to stretch to perform themselves?

Or would you just be guessing, since there are no strictures on the composers?

Good wishes!

Most are for advanced pianists, but not insane at any level. I did provide a simple guidance to the composers: "Don't kill the pianist"! The pianist will have about 5 months to study 9 works, totalling more than 60 minutes of music, so I asked very politely to not over stretch her...

Now, in the actual terms of difficulty, I can't just grade them like that, but we would be looking at grade 7 and above for sure. (in an 1-10 system! )

Plus most works will be 4-7 minutes of length, thus not the short type of compositions that most guilds (ABSRM, Trinity, RCM) seem to prefer for the exams.

On the other hand, as I'm a piano teacher myself, I usually put my students to a few short works and one longer one. So, for example, one may be doing short single page works and btw also the Dm Fantasy by Mozart (which spreads at around 7 minutes long)...

Finally, I'll be honest that since there's 9 of us, composers, in there, I can't give a precise sentiment. BUT, you can have a listen to the updates section in the kickstarter page and listen to what's going on. And you can check out other piano works, by the same composers, to get a better idea as well. I'll link some below:

Jaap Cramer
His work so far: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i-13mERSWA
and two more works
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw9hUzSM84c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVfX2zS63XU

Scott Miller
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmEU6wqOzoM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmw1quwNFwM

Nikolas Sideris
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvrqRpZ63w4

Carlos Alvarez Torno
His work so far: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-j2GaTq1VU
and another work of his
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB4e2fSKdrU

Christos Papageorgiou
He's done a set of more than 32 (no idea why) variations on a theme by M. Theodorakis.
here's three of them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EebQx-Vlo70

Paul Poston
No piano work available at this moment, but there's a preview of a short part of his work in the kickstarter page.

Barnaby Hollington
No piano work available at this moment.

Nickos Harizanos
His work is complete and I can say that it's rather "easy" (intermediate - advance level).

Andrew Sigler
No piano work available at this moment, but from what I've seen his work will be rather difficult.

hem... after a very long post... Hope this helps!

Nikolas, might I suggest that you provide a little more information in this thread? That way, people can learn about what the project is without having to go to the Kickstarter page? (This is likely to actually increase the number of people who visit the page)

In your original post, you state the reasons you believe in the project, but at that point, we still have no idea what the project itself actually is.

You're right!

So,

This is a "multi-media" project more or less. It involves classical music (for piano), illustrations and most probably a video as well (recent development).

The purpose is to produce and publish a high quality music score with 9 black and white illustrations, created by three artists, and 9 music scores, from nine composers. It also involves the recording of the 9 pieces by a pianist, to the best possible location in Greece (unless we actually have the funds to go elsewhere), and the production of the digital recording in downloadable form (mp3/flac) and physical form (CD) as well as the analog recording (double LP (Vinyl)). Then since this project contains so much art, I figured that a high quality, hard cover art-book with the illustrations, along with other information, sketches, drafts, ideas, etc should also be available in digital and physical format.

Obviously all the above cost a significant amount of money, that a small publisher like myself cannot take on as it stands right now! Thus the kickstarter effort.

Below one can see mockup images of what the products will most likely look like:



And further down are three examples of the illustrations. I can't post all nine, since it will flood the thread, so I hope these three will give enough of an idea.


Creating the space


The kids are our future


The butterfly fixer

As one can see, there are different takes to what Beauty & Hope in the 21st century stands for. For the first artist (Elwira Pawlikowska) this was an opportunity to explore the recent developments in science and find ways to hope for a better tomorrow through that. For the second artist (Piero Pierini) his efforts went into a philosophical route, while the third artist (William Chajin) went to a rather political and social stance...

And each composer has taken a different route to their compositions. However, a common thread of a small aesthetic idea seems to coexist in all of them (as far as I can tell from the samples I've seen and heard). In the following soundcloud link one can listen to 4 examples of the music that's been composed.

https://soundcloud.com/editions-musica-ferrum/sets/beauty-hope-in-the-21st

Thank you for asking and for proposing that! It makes every sense in the world, but I was too preoccupied with the project itself to take notice!

Nikolas

Just a friendly bump! We're surpassed 6000 and counting... 64 hours left! ^_^

Here's a little video thank you note from me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRrEsHq3ehI Since the video (yesterday morning) I shaved!

Nikolas, I missed your answer to my question, so here's a belated thank you. It looks like a fantastic project and I hope it goes well!

Shiro: Thanks back at you! You were spot on, when you said that I should explain more about this project and... well... here you are then! 40 to go! And I'm starting to feel nervous, to be honest!