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Lincoln native Ann Moss at Bemis Hall – Jan. 31

Singer Ann Moss will give a free concert in Bemis Hall on Friday, Jan. 31 in support of her debut album, Currents. For more information, see the January 16 story in the Lincoln Squirrel. Reserve a seat online by clicking here.

Choral evensong at St. Anne’s – Feb. 9

Did you miss the Christmas choral concert at the First Parish, or do you want to hear more music like it? Come to St.-Anne’s-in-the-Fields Church on Sunday, February 9 at 5 p.m. for “Choral Evensong.” The event will feature choral music of the English renaissance, including Gibbons’ “Short Service” (a classic setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis), Batten’s exuberant “O Sing Joyfully,” and familiar hymns of Tallis and Purcell. Early baroque organ music by Buxtehude and Pachelbel will open and close the service. A wine and cheese reception will follow. Admission and parking are free. For more information, contact the parish office at parishoffice@stanneslincoln.org.

Susan Cattaneo performs at LOMA – Feb. 10

Singer Susan Cattaneo will be the feature artist at the next LOMA (Lincoln Open-Mike Acoustic) at the Lincoln Public Library on Monday, Feb. 10.  LOMA, a monthly event of acoustic music and spoken word, runs from 7-10 p.m. Cattaneo will perform a half-hour set On Feb. 10 starting around 8:30 p.m. Singer/songwriter Cattaneo has a transfixing voice whether she’s singing folk, country or rock ‘n roll. She is a finalist in the Mountain Stage Newsong Contest and has opened for music icons including Amy Grant, David Wilcox, Ellis Paul, and Huey Lewis and the News. Her four albums include her latest CD, Haunted Heart.

LOMA performers can sign up at the event or by emailing LOMA organizer Rich Eilbert at loma3re@gmail.com before noon of the open-mike day for a slot. Names of those who are signed up by 7:15 p.m. will be drawn at random. We have a sound system with mikes and instrumental pickups suitable for individuals or small groups playing acoustic-style. We encourage you to sign up in advance. Local high school and college-age residents are encouraged to perform and/or listen to their friends play acoustically. We expect everyone will have a chance to perform one or two pieces. Refreshments will be served.

Upcoming LOMA featured artists include:

• Cosy Sheridan – March 10
• Heather Pierson – April 14
• Tom Hanlon and Leslie Bryant – May 12
• Creek River String Band – June 9

Three more days to submit Town Meeting warrant articles

The Board of Selectmen will finalize the warrant for the Annual Town Meeting on January 27. Petitions by citizens to insert an article on the warrant for an Annual Town Meeting require 10 signatures. Contact the Office of the Board of Selectmen (781-259-2601) for further information. Town Meeting will be held on Saturday, March 29 in the Brooks auditorium starting at 9:30 a.m.

Lincoln Review now on newsstands

The latest issue of the Lincoln Review s now on sale at Donelan’s, Codman Community Farm and the Old Town Hall Exchange. Contact editor Betty Smith at 781-259-9142 for more information.

Wellness clinics in February and March

Lincoln residents of all ages are invited to meet with a nurse through this free town service. Come to get your blood pressure and/or BMI (body mass index) checked, ask questions, or learn about wellness resources. Clinics will be held at the Community Building at Lincoln Woods at 50 Wells Road from 10 a.m. to noon on February 7 and March 14. These clinics are funded by CHNA 15 and provided by Emerson Hospital Home Care. For more information, please call the Lincoln Council on Aging at (781) 259-8811.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the faux pas of referring to Lord and Lady Grantham as “Lord and Lady Crawley.”

What shocking developments await Lord and Lady Grantham, Edith, Tom, Mrs. Hughes, Mr. Carson, Bates, Anna and the rest? More importantly, where can you go to watch and gossip about the Downton Abbey season 4 finale on February 23? The answer is Pierce House, which will host a screening party that evening.

Lincoln resident Virginia Rundell and other members of the Pierce House Committee are organizing the event, which includes tea, champagne and sweets in the elegant parlor of historic Pierce House from 7-10 p.m. Admission at the door is $10.

“I’m not a big sports fan, but I’ve always been a little envious of sports bars and how people get together and watch a game on the TV and that sort of easy camaraderie, but I don’t do sports, so I thought we could do something like that with Downton Abbey as the focus,” Rundell said. “The Pierce House seemed like the perfect setting.”

This season’s final episode of the wildly popular PBS drama has already been shown in England, where DVDs of the entire season 4 will go on sale in late January. The Pierce House folks plan to screen the 70-minute finale from a DVD on a large screen staring at about 8 p.m., which is an hour before the rest of the country gets to see it. Cultured discussion before and afterwards will be accompanied by Jazz Age background music.

“We’re encouraging people to wear a [1920s] hat or gloves, or if they want to put on the whole regalia, that’s great,” Rundell said.

Seating is limited, so reserve your spot by contacting Rundell at vq@verizon.net or 781-259-0201.

By Alice Waugh

Brian McGrory, a Sudbury resident and editor of the Boston Globe will be one of four speakers at the Faye Goldberg-Scheff Memorial Lecture at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School on Thursday, Jan. 30.

The event is sponsored by the Foundation for Educators at L-S (FELS), which funds enrichment grants for teachers and staff at L-S. Traditionally, one of the grantees or another L-S faculty member gives a lecture on behalf of FELS in January, and the group designated the lecture in honor of Goldberg-Scheff of Lincoln, a FELS board member and teacher at the Lynch School in Winchester who died in a car accident in 2011.

Also scheduled to speak are Ana Sortun, chef/partner of Oleana, Sofra and Sarma restaurants; Chris Kurth, farmer/owner of Siena Farms in Sudbury; and author David McCullough Jr., son of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough who gave the famous “you’re not special” Commencement speech at Wellesley High School in 2012.

This year’s format was inspired by TED talks, where speakers keep an audience engaged with short presentations on different topics. “There’s no unifying theme to our FELS talk—it’s just inspiring and captivating speakers,” said Diane Metzger, president of the FELS board. “Our speakers were chosen simply because they are interesting individuals who live in Sudbury or Lincoln.”

The Faye Goldberg-Scheff Memorial Lecture on January 30 will be in the L-S Kirschner Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $10, or $5 for students and seniors.

Here’s the schedule for Lincoln Winter Carnival 2014, sponsored by the Parks and Recreation Committee. The three-day event is designed to foster a sense of community in the town of Lincoln, and all events are sponsored by Lincoln-based organizations. Please check event description for age limits, admission fees, pre-registration information, etc.

[Read more…] about Lincoln Winter Carnival schedule announced

Two updates…

1. Due to an unfathomable technical glitch, a story on leaf blowers that was schedule to post on January 14 has only just now appeared.
2. I’ve updated the story on singer Ann Moss to add information on how you can make a tax-deductible contribution to her tour.

 

To celebrate the new year, the Lincoln Squirrel has redecorated a bit to make it easier to read. Also, the Squirrel now has the ability to accept display advertising—both banner ads just above the horizontal list of links at the top, and ads of any height in the right-hand column below the calendar summary, which will be shortened to accommodate ads as needed. Stay tuned to this space for information on ad rates, which will be coming soon. Thanks for reading!

— Alice Waugh
Editor, The Lincoln Squirrel

By Alice Waugh

Editor’s note: See addendum at the end of this story on how you can support the concert tour.

An accomplished West Coast singer will be coming to Lincoln to give a free concert—but it certainly won’t be the first time she’s been in town. In fact, she has a Lincoln pedigree spanning three generations.

Ann Moss, who has just released Currents, her debut CD, grew up here. Her parents are Weston Road residents Pip and Jane Moss, and her grandparents, the late Lenny and Frannie Moss, lived a short walk away on Woodcock Lane. Moss will return to her hometown on January 31 to give a free concert in Bemis Hall (see details below).

Moss, who lives in Richmond, Calif., just outside Berkeley, sings mostly contemporary music by living composers, but she’s well versed in many musical genres and enjoys making connections where they don’t usually exist, such as singing chamber music, which is usually thought of as solely instrumental, or bridging the gap between composer and performer.

Her eclectic leanings aren’t surprising given her background. She began learning piano at age five from her grandmother Frannie, who taught dozens of Lincoln children over the years. Frannie was also the longtime accompanist for school chorus concerts and musical productions led by her son Pip, Moss’s father and the music teacher at the Brooks School from 1970 until 2004 (what’s now the Lincoln School was once three separate schools—Hartwell, Smith and Brooks).

As if that wasn’t enough, Moss’ grandfather Lenny was a violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 43 years, and her mother Jane taught flute to Lincoln students and played in chamber groups while Moss was a child.

Growing up, Moss heard all kinds of music. While everyone in her family played a symphonic instrument, her parents were college students in the 1960s and filled the house with rock, blues, jazz, and folk as well as classical music. She sang in the choir at the Acton Congregational Church (where he is still senior choir director) as well as playing piano and singing in school groups. “It was obvious from an early age that Ann was very musical,” her father Pip said.

However, Ann didn’t start focusing on vocal performance until relatively late in the game. “I didn’t really know that you could study singing like an instrument,” she said. When she was in high school, her grandfather took her to see a performance of a Mozart piece by Italian coloratura mezzosoprano Cecilia Bartoli. “It was impactful. I had never seen a singer in person do that,” she said. She began taking private voice lessons with Mary Crowe (another Lincoln resident) during her senior year in high school and also sang in a funk band.

While music was central to her life, Moss also wanted to study literature and art history in college. “I wanted my undergraduate time to be a full-on liberal arts experience—I didn’t want to get too specialized too early,” she said. Hampshire College, where students design their own programs of study, “couldn’t have been a better place for me to find myself in my own way.” She designed a program called Music and the Related Arts even as she realized she wouldn’t be pursuing piano as a career.

“It became clear to me I was not going to have the technical chops to stay with the [piano] literature as it got harder and harder. Piano was not going to be my main instrument,” Moss said. Meanwhile, she was being praised and recognized by her choral directors with solos, and she found she had a natural facility for voice. She went on to earn a graduate degree at the Longy School of Music, where she also started singing in a chamber ensemble with piano and viola as a way to work more closely with other musicians.

After spending her entire life in Massachusetts (and suffering regularly from strep infections in the winter), Moss decided it was time for a change, so she set out for the West Coast and wound up at the San Francisco Conservatory for more training — and more chamber ensemble singing. After graduating, she and two other conservatory alumnae founded One Art Ensemble, a chamber group highlighting new and historic works for soprano, viola and piano that performed in Bemis Hall in 2010.

“In school, I was with singers 24 hours a day and I started to lose my mind,” Moss said. Normally a singer rehearses with a pianist or a whole opera cast on a specific program or piece, “but in my chamber ensembles, I rehearsed with the other players all the time, like in a rock band. We were working on establishing a group sound and a group sensibility.”

Moss has sung at many festivals and concert series across the country and is now a voice teacher herself, as well as a regular guest lecturer on composition for voice. In the 2013-2014 season, her performances include the West Coast premiere of Henri Dutilleux’s Le Temps L’horloge for Soprano and Orchestra, Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 on a concert tour with the Hausmann Quartet, and new chamber works composed for her by Vartan Aghababian and Liam Wade, with whom she co-founded the new music repertory group CMASH in 2008. CMASH is a New Music repertory group that fosters collaborations between composers and performers.

“Versatility has become my specialty,” Moss said. “I like to mix old and new. It’s great living in California because there’s a lot of openness about genre blending and a lot of freedom designing programs.”

Moss’s eclectic musical interests can be traced back to her family members’ wide-ranging tastes. “When [Frannie] talked about Duke Ellington, it was with same reverence as when she talked about Mozart,” she said. Likewise, for her father, “Dylan and Bach — it was all of equal value.”

There was more new territory to be discovered in creating a CD, which involved not only singing but planning, budgeting, fundraising and publicity. “It was an intense process—it was like doing three graduate programs at once,” Moss said. Her goal of working with a “dream team” of musicians in different musical styles and locations also proved to be one of the biggest challenges. “It was nuts trying to coordinate all this stuff,” she said.

Along the way, Moss also learned about yet another aspect of modern music. “I thought of myself a live performer — I didn’t understand recording as its own art form,” she said. “It’s a total collaboration. The engineer, the producer, the mixer—everyone plays a role in sculpting this sound artifact.” Currents was recorded at Skywalker Sound with producer/engineer Leslie Ann Jones and is available on Amazon.com and other sites.

“It’s very much a self-portrait. It’s a retrospective of the last 10 years of my work with living composers and chamber ensembles,” Moss said. The album features everything from flamenco to Joni Mitchell and combinations including voice and piano, voice and string quartet, and voice and guitar, as well as two song cycles written especially for her.

Doing an album was a lot of work but also an education, and “now that I’ve done it once, I just can’t wait to do it again. I already have my list going for my next project,” she said.

Ann Moss’ Lincoln concert is Friday, January 31 at 7:30 p.m. in Bemis Hall. Admission is free, but you must order tickets online by clicking here. Also featured will be Steven Bailey on piano with special guests Ryan Shannon on violin and Justin Ouellet on viola. CDs, digital download cards and tour posters will be available for purchase.

Addendum, Jan. 19 — There is no admission charge for the concert, but attendees and others are welcome to make a tax-deductible donation to support thee tour through through CMASH’s Indiegogo site. Optional perks for donors include a CD or digital download of the album, a signed tour poster, and your name in the concert program.