Phew... running an ensemble is so much work... there is so much that goes on behind the scenes, and I'm the sort of person that would just prefer to just play instead of writing or promoting the ensemble. One day, we will have the budget to employ someone else to do it professionally... but, until then, I'm doing it all myself and my wife proofreads and gives the final okay before everything goes out.

This last month has been about planning the year ahead... and that has meant booking in the concert dates/venues as well as the guest artists... that is the easy part. The harder part has been the application for grant funding that would enable us to fully realise the year... of course, we have contingency upon contingency for different levels of support ranging from the large grant, to the smaller grant, to no grant!

... and we did fail at the long shot large grant. That was to be expected for a group that was only a year old! But, it didn't hurt to try... and the feedback was quite supportive as well, which gives me hope to keep taking a shot at it!

... but it did mean that we had to scale back significantly from the crazily ambitious plan... actually, I was starting to think it was TOO ambitious even if we were successful with the grant! And this is our preferred 2024 plan...

I did have to go back through the documentation and letters and budget to adjust everything for the smaller grant. And I think that I've pretty much got it all. The budget is the most annoying part, as it is quite hard to project out into the future with any accuracy (at least we have one year of running data to draw upon... unlike last year!)... and the annoying part is that it all has to zero out. So, that is just asking for people to just make up numbers to make it all fit together...

... and then there the writing part, and that is quite difficult. To write in 200 word blocks about your aims and goals and WHY you should be supported... especially when the actual questions and criteria are quite difficult to understand (they are not really layperson speak...), and so I end up just writing about what I think they are asking about instead. Thank goodness for the practice in writing that I gotten on HIVE!

So, all the questions are done and dusted.... they were mostly adaptations of the answers from the larger grant round. But I did have to remove mention of parts of the project that aren't viable under the smaller grant offering. But it is a good deal less stressful...

... and taking the advice that I was first given when I started this ensemble, there is a contingency for zero funding. This would mean that we are dependent on ticket sales and donations, which isn't a terrible thing either. We did have enough interest in our concerts last year to be almost fully independent, given that we don't pay ourselves (like any good startup...) and only look after our guest artists!

Now that the grant writing is done, it does feel like a burden is lifted and I can get to thinking about the actual playing and programming of the concerts! In addition to our "main" round of 4 chamber concerts, we already have 10-12 "other" projects for the year... education, outreach, recording... sigh, lots and lots of things that need to be organised! It is crazy for an ensemble that is only coming into its second year of existence, but my wife and I wouldn't have it any other way!

To finish off, here is a little snippet of one of our concerts last year...

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