Success-in-progress stories: Sybarite5

I missed you all on Monday.  Tomorrow, we'll continue the planning process for your event (make sure you've checked for potential conflicts in the evenings of the last week of classes) and start looking at young classically-trained musicians who are making successful careers by being innovative and entrepreneurial.  We'll also be working more on improvisation and comprovisation, so please bring your instrument or a drum if you wish.

We'll start with Sybarite5, a string quintet (string quartet plus a double bass, in their case) which plays a wide variety of music from multiple genres.  Look through their site.  Notice the distinct visual style, the type of photography, and their effective videos, including the promo video below.

One of the interesting things they to is to present events they call "The Shuffle Effect," in which their repertoire is loaded on an iPod and they use its shuffle function to select the pieces in real time.  I heard them do one of these in January 2011 in NY--it worked very well.  They ended up with a Radiohead suite, as I recall.

They play in lots of different places.  This is from their About page:

Recent performance highlights include the Library of Congress, Aspen Music Festival, and in New York at Lincoln Center, Time Warner Center, Tishman Auditorium and Bohemian National Hall.  Through its Alternative Venues Initiative, the quintet has also performed at such diverse locations as Galapagos Artspace, the Apple Store, the Museum of Sex, the Core Club, and the Cutting Room, and at the Cell Theatre, where SYBARITE5 maintains a residency.  The group has also performed on the CBS Early Show and for his Holiness the Dalai Lama.

In upcoming classes, we'll also be talking more about [le] poisson rouge, the club in Greenwich Village which presents classical music along with every other genre, and which I've mentioned in class several times.