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FOR UNIVERSITIES

Fresh Inc Residencies bring the immersive, innovative spirit of Fifth House Ensemble's annual Fresh Inc Festival to universities and conservatories nationwide!

Since 2012, Fresh Inc has helped performers, composers, and pre-formed ensembles to envision and launch their own authentic careers in music, rooted in adventurous genre-defying collaboration, entrepreneurial thinking, and meaningful partnerships with audiences and community.

Each season, Fifth House partners with forward-thinking schools of music for short and long-term residencies that redefine the training process for emerging artists, and create new avenues for community engagement. Residencies can be stand-alone training opportunities, connected to one of our performance projects, or an opportunity to build new artistic work with students and community.

Drawing from Fresh Inc's core series of sequenced workshops which guide artists in building careers in line with their own unique vision and values, Fresh Inc Residencies are all about making connections and building capacities that last well beyond each visit.

Each Fresh Inc Residency is a customized program designed to respond to the needs of emerging artists, sparking new thinking at critical moments of change.

 
“The final concert told a story—our story—in words and music in a way that no one had ever heard before. It was one of my best days in this school or this town. Fifth House is dedicated to impacting communities through their music.
We are proof of concept.”
— D. Mark McCoy, Ph.D., Dean, DePauw University School of Music
 

workshops

Whether connected to a performance project, or as a stand-alone training opportunity, Fifth House works with faculty and students to create a residency curriculum that supports creativity, collaboration, and community. We have presented residencies ranging in length from one day bootcamps to 24-month engagements that support the launch of new initiatives on campus and in community.

Below is a sample of our workshop topics, and we’re happy to work with you to build custom training to align with students’ needs.

ARTS START-UP BOOTCAMP
Topics include: transitioning from college to career, starting an arts organization, fundraising (individual, corporate, foundation, crowdfunding), financial management, budgeting, booking/sales, marketing, and bios/resumes/interview skills.

CREATIVE PRESENTATION
Topics include: artistic programming, audience-centric programming, arts-integrated educational programming, fundamentals of civic practice, public speaking, and Deep Listening.

For a full list of workshop topics and descriptions, or for perusal access to the Fresh Inc Digital Edition:

 
“Fifth House Ensemble’s creative energy and enthusiasm is unmatched by other ensembles, a key trait that makes them a stand-out ensemble. Their messages resonated clearly with our students, and left a lasting impact on our students – NEC students are still talking about this event seven months later!”
— Rachel Roberts, New England Conservatory
 

DIGITAL RESIDENCIES

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in our 15-year history here at Fifth House Ensemble, it’s that our strength as artists is the way we engage our creativity and flexibility in times like these.

After pivoting our Fresh Inc Festival to a digitally-connected experience last summer, we’ve been supporting chamber music and composition departments in treating this moment as a feature, not a bug. Together, we create customized residency programs that drive creativity, collaboration, and innovation, resulting in new works developed specifically for digital spaces.

We share tools, process, and curriculum for developing performance projects that are pre-recorded, as well as those that are designed for live performance on digital platforms.

Through the development, adaptation, and performance of works both existing and brand new, we explore:

RECORDING TECHNIQUES
Microphone placement, Digital Audio Workstations, video editing, and tools for online collaboration.

IMPROVISATION
We encourage students to connect to their own creativity, and respond to the impulses of others through improvisation and Deep Listening practice. These creative collaboration skills apply to the interpretation of works both traditional and experimental.

NON-TRADITIONAL NOTATION
Fifth House Ensemble guides students through the interpretation and adaption of graphic/video/text scores and other forms of non-traditional notation that are made for, or performable in, digital settings.

COMPOSITION
We go beyond the standard reading to create a professional commissioning environment for composers, working over multiple sessions to share tools/processes for creating new works for digital spaces, offer an opportunity to share/test ideas mid-project, and develop final performance versions of newly created works.

VIRTUAL PERFORMANCES
Final performance projects can be recorded and/or presented via live stream on multiple platforms.

To discuss a digital residency:

 
“Fifth House Ensemble does top notch work that is relevant and engaging to a broad spectrum of audiences. The ensemble’s programming — and their rich diversity of experiences — provides a range of opportunities to collaborate with both academic and community partners. During their weeklong digital residency, members of the ensemble presented workshops targeting composers, gamers, music therapists, music educators and instrumentalists. Their culminating performance — which was the first performance to be streamed on our post-Covid streaming platform — attracted one of our largest ‘new music’ audiences, with engagement from audiences across the U.S. and Europe.”
— Courtney Reilly, Executive Director of Performances & Engagement, and Artistic Director of Performing Arts Live, Shenandoah Conservatory
 

RECENT PROJECTS

Below are some of our favorite works presented during the 2020 Fresh Inc Festival, each developed specifically for performance on digital platforms.

For Universities Gallery


a piece that can be played using a specially designed app


for clarinet, trumpet and contrabass using pre-recorded sound, playing to individual timers

for wind quintet and piano, playing off video conference-shared score with integrated timer

a traditionally notated piece incorporating latency from video platforms

for violin, viola, cello, and bass; sound processed through Zoom, Google Meet, and Skype simultaneously

an animated score for 5 or more players, with each player pre-determining 8 sonic events to correspond with the 8 colors in the score


 
“We are so grateful for your leadership and support throughout this project ... your patience and creativity inspired all of us to try new ways of doing things and as a result, we all grew so much as artists and humans.  Like us, the students loved working with you and are grateful for the time you spent supporting their efforts.  This was a categorically positive, even life-changing experience for all us: these lessons about collaboration and expression the students will take into their future musical endeavors.  THANK YOU for making all of this possible!”
— Laura Talbott-Clark, Associate Professor of Violin, Oklahoma State University
 

testimonials

 
 

past residency partners

  • Arizona State University

  • Baldwin Wallace Conservatory of Music

  • Binghamton University

  • The Colburn School

  • The Curtis Institute of Music

  • DePaul University

  • DePauw University

  • The Eastman School of Music

  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  • Indiana University - Jacobs School of Music

  • Lawrence University Conservatory of Music

  • New England Conservatory

  • Northwestern University

  • Oklahoma State University

  • Shenandoah Conservatory

  • Western Michigan University

  • Yale University

 

Fifth House Ensemble acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.