Guest Artist Concert Series

FTCC Foundation has received a Project Support Grant in the amount of $5,000 from the Arts Council of Fayetteville/Cumberland County to develop a Guest Artist Concert Series with the Music Department at Fayetteville Technical Community College. This will be the largest scale event series that the Fine Arts Department at FTCC will have coordinated with grant funding. Project Support Grants are supported by the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

The series will bring in three diverse guest musical artists in the 2023-2024 academic year. Each artist will perform a concert that will be free and open to the public and will give a lecture with a question and answer period. Most artists will also provide master classes for FTCC students. Additional concerts, exhibitions, lectures, and theatrical performances will be offered throughout the year through the FTCC Fine Arts Program.

The guest artists selected for the 2023-2024 academic year are:

• Latin Grammy Award-Winning producer Lannie Battistini will perform October 24-25, 2023, and will present “Finding Your Artistic Voice and Monetizing It.”
• The Fayetteville Symphony Orchestra’s Jazz Quartet will perform with the FTCC Chorus and Ensemble on December 7, 2023, and will deliver the pre-concert talk entitled “Curating a Career as a Musician.”
• North Carolina-based composer, performer, and educator Brittany J. Green will give several lectures and demonstrations from February 21-29, 2024. A concert of her original musical compositions will take place on February 22. Her artistic practice includes spoken and electronic performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, experiential projects, and acoustic and electroacoustic chamber and large ensemble works.

The guest artists will work closely with FTCC students, and culminate with performances for the general public. Instead of the typical master-class and concert approach, Alec Powers (music instructor) plans to incorporate a series of interactive elements with each artist that encourage active engagement from the students in the creative process. Ideas for these engagements include collaborative commissions from composers, mini-residencies from performers, workshops that deal with issues in the music industry, collaborative performances between student ensembles and guest artists, and more. Powers believes that these sorts of active learning opportunities are much more valuable than a passive master-class approach, and engender greater musical collaboration with our guest artists than the traditional approach.

The series will not only have performances that are open to the public, but will allow the possibility of collaborative engagements with local colleges, universities and high schools to better promote the arts in Fayetteville and Cumberland County.

For more information about the FTCC Guest Artist Concert Series, contact the FTCC Foundation at foundation@faytechcc.edu or 910-678-8441, or the Music Department at music@faytechcc.edu or 910-678-9773.

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This project is supported by a grant from the Arts Council of Fayetteville|Cumberland County in part by contributions from community partners, and through grants from the City of Fayetteville, Cumberland County, and the N.C Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural & Cultural Resources.

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