JAVS Summer 2021

From the President

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

database, but it can be a great start for research. If you’d like to learn more, visit our website or email recording-label@ americanviolasociety.org. We are also accepting donations to help defray costs to participants. Another exciting news item: after years of negotiations to find mutually agreeable terms, the AVS is once again a member of the International Viola Society. The creative problem solving of both executive boards has allowed us to find a way to move forward that maintains the AVS’s adherence to US non-profit tax law and regulations, while also allowing us to be involved and support the international viola community. For an initial term of three years, the AVS will be making an annual donation of 500 Euros towards the IVS Congress fund in lieu of the previous arrangement of 7% of membership dues. These terms will be reexamined when the three-year term expires. This information will be sent via email to members soon as well—many of you have reached out over the past few months regarding not receiving notices. Please take a moment now to add info@avsnationaloffice.org to your saved addresses. This will help ensure that notices do not go directly to your spam folder. Finally, this edition of JAVS marks the end of Andrew Braddock’s term as Editor. He has done an amazing job in this role, finding excellent material, creative content, and helping us move to a digital journal offering on top of it all. Please take a moment to thank Andrew for all his done for the AVS. All endings provide new beginnings, and as such, please join me in welcoming our incoming Editor, Christina Ebersoshl to the role. In her interview for the position, she impressed the committee with her vision for the Journal—stay tuned to see more exciting developments!

Summer 2021 is already proving to be an exciting one for our society. Our first ever virtual conference was a huge success, and we thank all of you who participated and helped to make this event possible. Many members of our board were

instrumental in transitioning from a live event model to an online event, but the bulk of the work has fallen to our President-Elect, Ames Asbell. She has committed hundreds of hours to making the event a success, so please join me in thanking her for her tireless work to make sure we were able to gather this year for our Festival. In case you missed the fun, we shared several news items at the Festival that I’d like to draw your attention to in this letter. First, I am pleased to announce that we will have a LIVE In-Person Festival June 1–4, 2022 at the Schwob School of Music in Columbus, Georgia. A call for proposals will be announced soon. For more information, contact katrin.meidell@americanviolasociety.org. Next, we are proud to announce the formation of the AVS Recording Label. The expense of making professional recordings too often determines which violists have recordings available. As a result, many wonderful musicians and excellent repertoire remain unheard. We have developed this label to help address these issues and plan to release one album per year for lovers of the viola everywhere. Our first project will be a compilation album featuring works by composers currently underrepresented in our canon. If you haven’t yet done so, check out our underrepresented composer database in order to help find works that are eligible. We are not limiting submissions to works in this

May you all have a great summer,

Hillary Herndon

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 37, 2021 Online Issue

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