VCCA Salon Series

As many as 400 artists a year enjoy residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Fellows, as they are known, frequently visit classes, and each month, the Center hosts an evening Salon Series on the Sweet Briar campus, in which two or three Fellows are invited to present their work to the community in the Reahard Gallery of the Cochran Library, which is equipped with a grand piano as well as suitable technology for showing visual images.

Writers, visual artists, and composers have given a wide range of presentations. For instance, Ailís Ní Ríain, an Irish contemporary classical composer, performed works created for the Brontë Parsonage in England, essentially a sonic accompaniment to a tour of the facility, including sounds that would have been present to the Brontës when they were living there, such as the ringing of a hammer on stone from the cemetery nearby, birdsong, or falling rain. Another composer, Andrea Clearfield, shared her work recording the last royal court singer of Lo Monthang in Nepal, a remote and restricted region near the border of Tibet. Those recordings are part of the World Oral Literature Project of Cambridge University, dedicated to preserving endangered languages. She also composed music influenced by the Tibetan music she heard, so her presentation and performance were intended to interest students studying music composition and performance, ethnomusicology, anthropology, religious studies, Asian studies, and world music, for example.