Our Mission and Audience

Our goals for the Anchor East house concerts are:

To present good, traditionally rooted music.
To provide and create a discriminating audience built up from aficionados of particular styles, who come to appreciate the quality and diversity of all the artists we invite to play.
To provide a setting with great acoustics, great warmth, and careful listeners, inspiring artists to enjoy themselves, take chances, play as they would among good friends at home.

Over the years we've cultivated a steady and fairly loyal group of folks who come out for these concerts. They are culled from enthusiasts of a wide variety of traditional music, but fiddle music is pretty central to the theme. It seems fiddle music more easily tempts people into crossing genres and going to hear an artist they don't know.

Each concert audience ideally draws from one or more strong musical communities, as well as from the mixed house concert community that has developed over the years. Our hope is to expose artists to people who would not normally have come out to hear them, and also to draw people to the house concert community that might otherwise not find out about it. This has been what's happened with past concerts by artists such as Jerry Holland (for the Cape Breton community), Martin Hayes (for Irish music), Popcorn Behavior (for the contra dance crowd) and Bruce Molsky (for old-time American fiddle music).

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