NACUSA MEETING  3/31/06 at 7:30 PM

Attending: Herb Gellis (President), Anne Baldwin (Treasurer),
Lorie Griswold, Dale Victorine.

Treasurer's Report

Anne reported we had $5347 and change in the bank. We of course
have a $2500 bill to pay to the Ives Quartet this June, and
that is followed by the CPE concert in November. So we will be
looking for good receipts from the next two concerts, need
good ideas for the silent auction at the upcoming June concert,
and should still plan on having a garage sale this summer.

June NACUSAsf elections

Positions up for election this June include the President,
Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer, and one member of the
Programming Committee (Joanne Carey's 2-year term will be up).
Anne agreed to run again for Treasurer. We are looking for
volunteers to run for the Programming Committee.

Dates for Spring 2007 concerts

Continuing the discussion of the previous meeting, we will attempt
to move the first Composers and Friends concert of the year
a little later. Hence, we will try for early March for the
C&F concert, late April for the C&F II concert, and June for
the "hired group" concert.

Hired group for 2007

Again further discussion from the previous meeting.
The sentiment may have been leaning towards hiring a choral group
as we haven't done that in several years. Herb suggested
possibly a subset of the San Jose Symphonic Choir which has done
excellent work with a subset of members, and they are members of
the SVAC, so it would be a collaboration with another SVAC group.
The Choral Project was also mentioned, who we hired the last time,
but they are probably "out of our price range" at this point.
Note, this is still very much on the table and Herb will be
polling the entire membership on this subject.

Anne brought up the possibility of hiring a woodwind quintet.
Herb's thoughts on the matter were that since we are hiring
an expensive and well-known local group for this June
(the Ives Quartet) we might try (once again) to hire the
Stanford Woodwind Quintet for two years from now (June 2008),
with a less expensive group for June 2007. Also, getting a group
like the Stanford quintet takes more planning on both our and
their parts, they need more advance warning and a hard date
to shoot for, and our composers need time to write something
further in advance than usual (just as we did for the Ives Quartet).

We also briefly touched on the possibility of using a different
venue for such a (Stanford Quintet) concert, though we realize
most any other venue will be more expensive. We were particularly
interested in a venue that is more well-known for music
presentations and with better acoustics (Le Petit Trianon in
San Jose is a prime example, though again relatively expensive.)

SVAC Arts Panorama in May 2006

Herb brought up the fact that the Arts Panorama this year is now
in May at the Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose,
and is intended to be family oriented, especially aiming for
interaction with the (young) children who would be there.
The SVAC is still looking for ideas from each group on how
they can represent their own arts specialty (in our case
composing) to groups of such young children. [The Arts Panorama
will last four hours, and each group would have to have a
re-usable interaction, since it will be used over and over again.]
We talked about drumming, rhythm and improvisation ideas. Dale
suggested possibly playing an ostinato on a synthesizer keyboard
(such as the one from Pachelbel's Canon) and have some kids
improvise over that.

Student Composition Contest

Sondra was not present so we didn't have an update on this.
We did discuss this a little. It was suggested that Paul Fink
be contacted for possible student composers. Our main problem
is figuring out who in the music world we should be contacting
in order to get sufficient submissions.

Miscellaneous

We discussed who would be doing which duties at the upcoming
Composers and Friends II concert. Dale would also like to see
the group have more social meetings and utilize our contacts
in the music world to help each other.

The discussions ended roughly around 10 PM.

Respectfully submitted,

Herb Gellis
President of NACUSAsf