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SoCal Chamber Music Workshop
The SoCal Chamber Music Workshop (SCCMW) is a 1-week workshop for adult amateur and professional chamber musicians, age 18 and above. Our participants include strings, piano, and winds. We gather for a week in July at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Musicians spend their days working on chamber music repertoire while receiving coaching to improve the quality of their musicianship in an ensemble. Our environment is welcoming, positive, and social while encouraging each musician to push beyond their limitations. For more details about the workshop, please see the following links: About SoCal, The Week in Detail, Special Projects, FAQs.
The 2024 workshop will be held July 21 – 27, 2024. Applications will open on February 1st.
SoCal 2024 Theme: Music for Solace
The past year was tumultuous, both globally and locally within our SoCal Chamber Music Workshop community, with the recent loss of our beloved founder Ron Goldman.
Because music has always provided refuge during difficult times, it seems fitting that our theme this year should be music for solace. We intend for this theme to inspire your group to select music that brings comfort from misfortune, sorrow, or grief.
How should we choose repertoire?
We ask that your group choose to play pieces that speak to individual members, each of whom might experience and process emotions differently — perhaps, for example, in reach of joy and laughter, in expression of inarticulable feelings, or in release of bottled-up anger or woe. Choices can be a response to specific events or to all that is generally happening around us.
Here are some classic examples: Shostakovich 8 (fury), Mendelssohn Op. 44 No. 1 first movement (triumph), Brahms Op. 8 trio first movement (strength), Dvorak piano quintet scherzo (lightness, humor), Schumann Piano Quartet Op. 47, Andante Cantabile movement (love); Beethoven String Quartet Op. 132, 3rd movement (redemption, hope, healing, eternal YES to life).
How should we prepare and perform that repertoire?
As you prepare individually at home, we urge you to think about how your piece expresses emotion — fear, grief, joy, longing, or other — that can bring solace to the listener (and, indeed, to you as a musician).
As your group prepares together at SoCal, we encourage your ensemble to share with your morning coach the reasons for choosing your piece, to enable the coach to elicit effective expression. We encourage you as an individual to articulate to your fellow musicians and coach how you might best partner with the composer to achieve this expression in your own part.
Finally, during afternoon pod sessions, we encourage one of your group to briefly introduce your piece and explain why you chose it. (Note that adherence to the year’s theme will not impact selections for the Participants' Concert.)
Dec. 12, 2023: It is with deep sorrow that we announce the death of Ron Goldman, chamber musician and violinist extraordinaire, founder and guiding light of the SoCal Chamber Music Workshop (San Diego Chamber Music Workshop) since its inception in the late '70's.
Ron founded the workshop in order to gather together a large group of likeminded amateur chamber musicians for intensive coaching by professional performers. His vision was to fill up the entire week --- every non-eating and non-sleeping moment --- with chamber music. For the first approximately 35 years Ron, together with his wife Wynnona, and the help of his sons, essentially ran the whole show -- with great skill, generosity, humor, and warmth -- which seems incomprehensible to the workshop's current board and large group of volunteers.
His dedication to the cause proved to be profoundly life-changing to many of the workshop's attendees.
We will forever be grateful and forever cherish his memory.
Ron Goldman
SoCal 2023
Reading Julius Eastman's "Gay Guerilla"
Danzon!
Celtic Jig Grooves
Jeff and Kindra - such love!
Tchaikovsky!
Del Sol Outdoors - Tango!
Mobile Library
Positively negative!
SoCal 2022
Celebrating Works By Women Composers!
During the 2022 workshop, we encouraged our participants to explore works written by women composers. Many of these beautiful works have been hidden from the spotlight and excluded from the traditional chamber music canon. We have curated a list of chamber works by women for you and your group to explore: Women Chamber Works. We have also purchased dozens of these works by women for our SoCal Library so that they are available to play at the workshop for years to come.
For the 2021 workshop, we sponsored a “Call for Scores” competition for best contemporary chamber piece written by a living woman composer who resides in California. This included string quartets and quintets which were not yet published and would be appropriate for chamber musicians at our workshop to play. The winner of this competition, announced May 15, 2021 was Erika Oba with her piece, “Akoya.” For more details about this project click here.
A video from our time as the San Diego Chamber Music Workshop
