Dear friends and fans of music, harps, and horns,

For the past two years, we have been performing classical harp and horn music together in New England as Apple Orange Pair. Now it's time for us to take our activities to a whole new level and make our first recording!

We hope you enjoyed our video, and learned a little bit about our project in the process. We've included everything in text on this page too--all the needed details are below.

Our Kickstarter fund-raising is live until December 1, so be sure to back our project before then!

What is our project about?

Our first recording will feature new music we have commissioned and performed by composers Russell Nadel, Michael Weinstein-Reiman, Naftali Schindler, and S. Beth May. Together, these pieces contain almost every style imagineable, from tuneful, graceful melodies to beautiful atmospheric sound worlds. (Colleen even gets to sing along in Naftali's piece!) Most importantly, the new pieces we have commissioned show different sides of the harp, the horn, and what they can do together.

Just for fun, our recording will also include some of our arrangements of pieces we have particularly enjoyed performing together, in genres as diverse as Renaissance madrigals and 20th-century tango music.

Why is our project important?

The pieces on our recording are all brand-new pieces that have never been professionally recorded or released before. Each new piece highlights the harp and the horn, individually and together, in ways that no other pieces we have performed yet do.

We have already performed most of these pieces in Connecticut and Maine earlier this year for live audiences who, like us, are excited about this new music. We can't wait to make this music available to wider audiences and performers soon through our recording.

Don't just take our word for how great this music is though! We'd love it if you listened ahead to samples, which you can find streaming on our website's music page. (We will be adding more clips throughout our 30-day campaign, so check back often!)

Why do we need your help?

The process of making a recording is a multi-step, potentially very expensive process, and we need your help to make our project successful at every step. From our recording sessions, to the final packaging and manufacturing, our recording project will require no less than $9000 to produce a finished product.

• $4500 will fund the cost of recording with our world-class recording engineer in New Haven, as well as mixing and mastering the sound for a finished product with excellent audio quality.
• The remaining $4500 allows us to work with a graphic designer for our album's design, funds disc manufacturing, and helps us afford the legal fees and distribution costs associated with releasing and distributing our album.

To keep production costs as low as possible, we are doing all of the management work ourselves. We also believe that this extra time and care we invest will give our recording a superb sound and design that is uniquely ours in every way.

What is our project's timeline if we meet our Kickstarter goal?

We begin recording sessions in JANUARY 2013 in New Haven. At the same time, we will be working with a graphic designer to create a truly unique design for our album's digital and physical packaging.

When recording, mixing, and mastering are finished (by or before early May), we will send our final recording and album design to be manufactured.

We expect to be releasing our recording by the end of JUNE 2013 as an online download on CDBaby, Amazon, iTunes, and similar websites. We will also be releasing our physical album through our website and promoting it through an Apple Orange Pair tour of the U.S. East Coast in May.

What happens if we don't meet our goal?

Before we can begin recording, we must have our Kickstarter project funded in full. If we don't meet our $9000 goal, we will receive NOTHING, and creating our recording will not be possible. While your credit card will not be charged, you will also miss out on all of the exclusive perks that come with backing our project.

What happens if we meet our goal?

If we successfully raise $9000 in 30 days, we get to make our recording, and you get to share in the recording process as our thank-you for investing in our project! With the complete funding in hand, as soon as 2013 hits, we will be able to start recording sessions and design work right away.You will also be entitled to sneak previews of our unreleased tracks, insider updates, and even have the opportunity to "commission" us to make new arrangements for horn and harp--dedicated to you!

How will we use surplus funds?

If we do receive more than $9000 in pledges, we are able to make our recording just that much better! $9000 is the minimum amount needed for us to produce a very good product. With every dollar above $9000, we can spend more hours in the recording studio fine-tuning our pieces, have more involved photo shoots and cover art, a spiffier CD package, and more widespread advertising. Surplus funds will also enable us to visit more cities (possibly yours) on our May 2013 promotional tour, and help defray travel costs.

How can you make our project succeed?

When you pledge money to our project, your credit card will be held for processing on Amazon until the end of our campaign. If we don't meet our goal, your credit card will not be charged.

If you are able to give, even $5 or $10 will go a long way to helping us meet our funding goal! Pledge as early as you can and don't just wait until the deadline! Early giving improves our project's visibility and chances of meeting its goal.

If you are unsure whether you are able to support us financially, we still urge you to share our project with your friends, family, and other music lovers you know. Increasing our project's visibility is another valuable way you can invest, without any monetary cost to you.

How do you pledge on Kickstarter?

To make a pledge to our project, simply click the green "Back This Project" button. You'll be asked to enter your pledge amount and select a reward. Then, you will be prompted to complete the purchase on Amazon. Please contact us if you need help!

What do you receive as a backer for our project?

If we meet our goal, you will be a valuable part of our project's creation at every step of the process!

No matter what you choose to invest, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you are supporting a valuable creative cause and championing the creation and dissemination of new classical music for two very special instruments.

• If you give $1 or more, you will receive frequent project updates from us by email so that you are on the "inside" of our recording process from Day 1.
• For as little as $10, you get digital downloads of selected tracks before our recording is released to the public.
• You may also get our entire digital album or signed physical CD sent directly to you, all before our official recording goes public.
• You could have a piece arranged for harp and horn, dedicated to, and performed for YOU!
• And backers living in Virginia, Washington DC, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, or Massachussetts could even be eligible for an Apple Orange Pair concert at their home in May 2013 as part of our promotional tour. (We are also able to perform house concerts at other times in other locations though!)

You can read our full list of rewards on the right-hand side of our project's page.

We hope that you are as excited about our recording as we are! We are excited to have you join us in sharing this wonderful music for horn and harp with the world.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about our project, we would love to hear from you! You can contact us directly at appleorangepair@gmail.com or through our website, http://www.appleorangepair.com, where you can join our email list to continue to get our regular performance updates.

Thank you for your encouragement and support of our project! We couldn't do any of our performances and projects without the invaluable help and enthusiasm of friends like you!

Warmly yours,

Emily and Colleen
Apple Orange Pair

More information about Apple Orange Pair

We began performing together in 2010, though we'd been friends for years before that. We both attended the Yale School of Music for our graduate music studies (at different times), which is what initially brought us to the New Haven area.

As musicians, we have always been passionate about presenting music of excellent quality in fun settings that invite our audiences to deeper interaction. We have enjoyed creating truly unique concert experiences together as Apple Orange Pair. Our concerts usually feature a unique blend of old and new music for horn and harp, as well as narration, different forms of visual media, and yes, even (sometimes) fantastic costumes.

In the two years we have been together, we have performed several classic works for horn and harp from the 18th to 20th centuries; arranged music by well-loved composers like Claude Debussy and Franz Schubert for horn and harp; and become increasingly active as performers of new music. In our second season, the Yale School of Music awarded us a grant to partially fund creating more new music for horn and harp.

The rest is history: four commissions, four world premieres, performances throughout the northeastern U.S., and now our first recording!

What do we do when we aren't playing as Apple Orange Pair?

Emily and Colleen are both professional musicians, teachers, and citizens concerned with investing wisely in the cultural activities of their communities:

• Emily teaches music at a Connecticut community college, horn through several music centers and schools, and is the director of arts at a church.
• Colleen plays principal harp with an orchestra in Connecticut one week of the month, and three weeks of the month performs and teaches harp and piano in Virginia, where she has been living since August.

Aside from their professional activities, Emily and Colleen like to have fun outdoors with ukuleles in the summer, enjoy fresh Maine lobsters, appreciate beautiful fall foliage (but not hurricanes or blizzards), and savor the finer things in life, like thin-crust pizza and decorative fake fruit.