Richard Hartshorne, known to all as Dobbs of Bach With Verse, has written stories to music since 1985: humorous, witty, zany, funny, touching, and beautiful stories which he narrates while simultaneously playing the music on his bass violin. He’s been performing them live in crazy places like Iraqi refugee camps, Afghan drug rehab centers, Palestinian UN schools, Ugandan prisons, Bolivian villages, and South African orphanages as well as jails and prisons in the US. They require virtuosic bass playing, singing of all kinds, plus an insane number of different voices and accents.

Over the years he has recorded most of them and now that we’re all sheltering in place he felt this was as good a time as any to share them with the world. Laughter works and will help all of us get through this crisis. Enjoy!

The website is linked below. You can also find Dobbs' stories on iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher.
 

Keith Murphy & Becky Tracy held a livestream release concert on Facebook, April 11 to celebrate the release of their new CD, Golden. The concert stream is still avavilable to enjoy. The two collaborated on "Golden" for many years. It is their first official duo recording and includes many of their favorite pieces from recent years, some intensely intimate and others driving and exuberant. The album is a showcase for Becky’s exquisite fiddling and Keith’s formidable multi-instrumentalism on guitar, mandolin, piano as well as his singing on a few beloved songs. The album includes some of their favorite musical collaborators: Shannon Heaton on flute, Mark Hellenberg on percussion and Mark Roberts on banjo.

Tune In: April 11 Concert!

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Living in a COVID-19 world means living in a time of great uncertainty, instability, and social upheaval. What can we all learn from this moment, about slowing down, observing details, adopting new routines, and embracing our limitations? Can COVID-19 be a portal, a virtual space for play, discovery, and social connection?

Fridays during the coming weeks, Redfern Arts Center in Keene will invite a past or future artist or collaborator to offer a creative prompt or a bit of their own creative practice. Respond to these prompts in the form of an image, short video, audio, text, a recipe, or anything that speaks to you. Have fun!

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Main Street Arts of Saxton's RIver, Vermont offers two virtual workshops at this time. One in photojournalism and the other in creative writing. Both are aimed at exploring what it means to live, work, play and pray during this extraordinary time. MSA hopes that when times are better, it can arrange an exhibit  to share some of the photography and writing. 

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Art projects galore! For those of you with young people at home, Ms Fletcher, a local art teacher at St. Joseph Regional School, is collecting art class activities in age appropriate categories on her pinterest boards.  Lots of fun projects ideas here!

Ms Fletcher's Pintarest Page

Join Monadnock Music for another free online performance! Just visit our Monadnock Music Facebook page at 3pm on April 19 and David Ross will be live streaming. The video will continue to be available on the MM website and Facebook after the concert, where you can also see earlier streamed concert performances.

From David Ross: "This is a strange and challenging time to be a musician. While we are all in isolation, I hope that music can continue to bring us together and strengthen a sense of community during this time. I'm happy to make an effort to that end and am looking forward to sharing some classic guitar repertoire. I plan to rekindle my relationship with some Spanish music by Albéniz and Tárrega and offer some great pieces by Piazzolla and other Latin American composers. I hope that this will be a casual, interesting, and connecting experience!"

Firelight Theatre Workshop begins its third season with the sixth installment of We Were Friends entitled New Vistas: Goodbye.  Firelight's episodic project is a creative reimagining of real-life time points in Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson's profound friendship -- set in today’s world. As Margaret and Ralph face the challenge of maintaining a long-distance friendship, Firelight will explore what it means to be in a long-distance, physically distanced, relationship with you, our community. 

In the We Were Friends timeline, this episode captures the last time Margaret and Ralph are both alive and friends. We never know when the world can turn upside down. Tune in as we imagine this unexpectedly important moment in their friendship. And as always, you can step into this story at any time.

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