Project History: The Journey


As touring performers, we were often frustrated at the brevity and shallowness of our interactions with our hosts when we jumped from city to city. We knew how vibrant and interesting these communities are, and we dreamed of a chance to spend more time with local artists -- talking, collaborating, getting to know one another.

In September 2005, ETHEL was asked by the Grand Canyon Music Festival to participate in its Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project. ETHEL spent two weeks driving 400 miles in Navajo and Hopi reservations in northern Arizona. We were blown away by the land, the people, and their music. This experience changed us immediately and permanently. Sharing music over time with local artists meant so much more than just sound. We saw the world through other eyes, recognizing cultural perspectives of our own that we usually carry around unexamined. We came face to face with a wisdom and global consciousness, maintained by these cultures over centuries and desperately needed by our own.

With the conviction from this experience that music can be an extremely effective tool for communication, ETHEL created TruckStop® to formally seek opportunities to meet with artists, students and laypeople from all cultures in the act of making music together. We were extremely fortunate to be awarded funding from some of the most important philanthropic organizations and government agencies supporting the arts in the United States.

Road-tested yet brand new, ETHEL’s TruckStop® is soul-stirring confirmation of the power of music as a common language. Sometimes, the TruckStop® process centers on listening to and interacting with traditional sounds; sometimes it concentrates on composition; sometimes it revels in imagination and free improvisation. In every case, the process honors the rich heritage of the participants, and all are invited to both lead and learn. The result is a fresh, passionate, unpredictable, deeply personal new body of music which, whether brought to performance, recorded, or simply rehearsed, is expressive and satisfying for all.

"We're taking ourselves off the stage and into the living rooms of artists, where we can share our varied cultural perspectives and human experiences through music," says violinist Mary Rowell. "This communion of music reflects the heart of this project."

During the inaugural TruckStop® tour in 2007-2008, ETHEL traveled 40,000 miles and visited ten cities in eleven months. ETHEL continued to be profoundly moved and changed by the human experience that defies categories and pioneers uncharted musical landscapes. In October 2008, ETHEL’s TruckStop® steered its way to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, New York for the world premiere of ETHEL's TruckStop®: The Beginning, a full-length multimedia show conceived by ETHEL and directed by Annie Dorsen (Broadway's Passing Strange) with video by Kate Howard, featuring ETHEL and four award-winning TruckStop® artists. The characteristically eclectic program featured GRAMMY award-winning Hawaiian slack-key guitarist Jeff Peterson; NAMMY (Native American Music Award) award-winning and 2008 GRAMMY award winner, flutist Robert Mirabal from Taos Pueblo, New Mexico; the “Queen of Tex-Mex” Tejano Conjunto accordionist Eva Ybarra from San Antonio, Texas; and Kentucky Blue Grass legend Dean Osborne. The result was music that is at once familiar and fresh; a lush amalgam of compelling aural spectacle, an organic exploration of the American musical melting pot. This show continues to tour; a live CD is in the works.

ETHEL's TruckStop® goes back on the road in fall 2009, returning to Arizona and the American Southwest -- a place of inspiration for this project. Other TruckStops are planned in 2010 and beyond, in the U.S. and in communities around the world.  ETHEL is also exploring opportunities for educational programs based on the TruckStop® collaborative model.










The National Endowment for the Arts, American Music Center's Aaron Copland Fund for Music:  Performing Ensembles Program and Recording Program, The Amphion Foundation, Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund, Arts International Fund for U.S. Artists, BMI Foundation, Inc., The Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Chamber Music America, James and Cornelia Deaderick, The Greenwall Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, LEF Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Meet the Composer’s Creative Connections Program, Meet the Composer’s JPMorganChase Regrant Program for Small Ensembles, The Multi-Arts Production Fund, A Program of Creative Capital Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The New York State Music Fund, The September 11th Fund.

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