ChamberLab: Alt-Classical Music in Tucson, Arizona
Channel: Chris Black
Date: 2016-09-27

ChamberLab is an alt-classical concert series in Tucson, Arizona, bringing new music to different audiences, in strange venues, and from unlikely sources. Where classical music tends to keep to itself, with its own musicians, its own composers, its own audiences — even its own concert halls — we do things differently.

Beginning as a one-off concert at the Screening Room in 2010, and resuming as a series in 2012, ChamberLab has since put on more than a dozen performances in such diverse venues as the Fox Tucson Theatre, the Hotel Congress, the Rialto Theater, and even 5 Points Market.

ChamberLab composers are members of Tucson’s thriving live music scene, with a hidden composerly bent to put pen to paper, writing new music for classically trained musicians in a range of ensembles, from string quartets, to bassoon trios, to brass and percussion, to other, more unusual arrangements.

ChamberLab also reaches across boundaries of medium in unique performances combining a variety of disciplines.

In 2013, we composed new music inspired by the paintings of muralist Joe Pagac, who then created new paintings inspired by our music, live, on stage, during the performance, while hearing the music for the first time.

In 2014 and again in 2015, we performed an original soundtrack to the classic Buster Keaton civil war comedy The General, live in the pit with a twelve-piece chamber orchestra while the film screened above our heads at the historic Fox Tucson Theatre.

In the fall of 2015, we collaborated with the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Space Laboratory and Tucson’s Flam Chen New Circus and Fire Theatre as a part of the Bennuval celebration in honor of the one-year countdown to the launch of Osiris Rex, on its way to the asteroid known as Bennu.

We’ve even had the opportunity to explain our boundary-breaking behavior in a TedXTucson talk, and we grow more ambitious and innovative by the day.

Our mission is to bring music to music lovers wherever they may be found, and to that end, our concerts are put on in casual venues where music lovers already congregate, thanks to the support of a generous and engaged community.

If you would like to become a part of that community, we’d be grateful for your support. Please visit www.ChamberLab.org to learn what you can do to help us grow and continue our good work, and thank you.

For more information, please visit www.ChamberLab.org.