Thank you, Readercon!

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Jul 192013
 

As the post-Readercon reports come in, it seems the consensus is that A Most Readerconnish Miscellany was a great success! (See here and here, and many of the tweets on the #Readercon hashtag.) Sassafrass opened the evening with Somebody Will, and we were followed by an incredible variety of wonderful performances.

Sandry, Kara, Lila, Ruth, and Tili, singing Somebody Will.

Sandry, Kara, Lila, Ruth, and Tili, singing Somebody Will.

Thanks so much to fellow performers C.S.E. Cooney, Daniel José Older, Caitlyn Paxson, Sonya Taaffe, Cat Valente, Andrea Hairston, Pan Morigan, John Kessel, Therese Ann Fowler, and Jeanne Beckwith, and hats off to Cooney again and to Mike Allen for their stellar appearances as emcees. Together we raised over $1,000 for the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center and Operation Hammond. Readercon was a lovely audience and we are delighted to have been able to bring our music to a new venue!

Vericoncert!

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Apr 042013
 

Vericon2013-1Sassafrass Boston and Ada were delighted to perform at Vericon, the Harvard/Radcliffe Science Fiction Convention!  Our concert was almost entirely Norse, including the first performance of the final two songs in the Sundown cycle.  These were “Here’s To Valhalla,” a drinking song for the warriors of Asgard, and a rough demonstration of “If I Could Ask You,” a quartet for Odin, Loki, Baldur and Hella.  The latter shows the children pleading with their fathers to give up their vengeance and the stubborn pride that will destroy the world through Ragnarok, and in rehearsal, Emily (Baldur) and Kara (Hella) sang the opening lines so beautifully that Ada (Loki) cried.  Which means that Loki has now wept for Baldur, so he’ll be released from Hell, and the world is saved!  Hurrah!  (Though that does mean there may need to be some slight revisions to the song cycle before we perform it at Balticon in May.  We’ll get right on that…)

Ada & Tili as Odin and Loki, performing "If I Could Ask You"

Ada & Tili as Odin and Loki, performing “If I Could Ask You”

We also sang “Gift of Life” and “the Futhark Song,” and ended with a group performance of “Somebody Will,” joined by the Harvard fan community and such Vericon guests as Greer Gilman and Jo Walton.  As always, it was great singing with and for you all, and we look forward to singing at Vericon again!

Also, we collected emails for our mailing list of people who want to be notified about our Kickstarter when we start it.  If you’d like us to add you to that list, please do let us know!

Sassafrass also helped once again with the  Vericon charity auction.  This year Ada as Loki helped lead a Team Competition, between “Team Good” and “Team Evil.”  In the end we raised more than $12,000 for Doctors Without Borders, four times what we did last year, and far beyond what anyone expected.  You can see the records of the competition on the chalkboard behind us.  Many thanks to all who helped make the auction a staggering success!

Songs in the Key of π

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Aug 202012
 

Some pie at Pi-Con!

We have returned happily from Enfield, CT, where the Boston Contingent of Sassafrass performed at this year’s Pi-Con! The concert featured some of our newer Norse songs– Kara and Emily dueting on “Abandoned,” as well as our full-group Sundown finale, “Longer in Stories Than Stone.” We also brought back some very old favorites, like “For You Are the Wind,” and “All the Time in the World,” and closed with a full-group rendition of “Somebody Will,” dedicated to the Mars Rover Curiosity. Stay tuned– we hope to post videos from the concert to our YouTube channel by the end of the week!

We’d like to thank everyone who helped us this weekend, especially Peter Ellis for his splendid work in organizing and making everything happen, as well as our Stranger Ways colleague Nat Budin for all his technical help with the panel we presented on Sunday morning on audio recording and multi-tracking. And it was, as always, great to see so many new and familiar faces in the audience at our concert, and at the Filk 101 panel on Saturday morning. We’re looking forward to seeing you all again at Arisia, if not before!

To keep people up-to-date, we’re also happy to announce the rejuvenation of our Twitter account, @sassafrassmusic.  Please follow us there for all the latest news on concerts, recording, videos, new songs, and everything else you might want to know!