Feel free to use/adapt as you see fit
Re Music on the Mind by Harvey Brough (libretto Justin Butcher)
Dear …………….
To mark the start of Vox Holloway’s 10th Anniversary Year, we will be performing and recording Music on the Mind at Shoreditch Town Hall, over the weekend of November 23rd/24th 2019. We would encourage you to come to hear this amazing work, to bring all your friends and to add your support to this important project.
Music on the Mind is a two-part exploration of the complex and sensitive issues surrounding mental health. Through musical settings of poetry by people like John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and others, we explore the experience of ‘madness’ and the creativity that can emerge from the struggle to cope with it. The second half is based on Kay Redfield Jamison’s ground-breaking memoir, An Unquiet Mind, a frank and often funny account of her struggles with manic depression, otherwise known as bipolar disorder.
Stephen Fry acclaimed her as one of his personal heroes and described Music on the Mind as ‘a simply fantastic project’ after its premiere in 2015. In a video posted at the same time, Emma Thompson said she ‘found it unspeakably moving’. https://vimeo.com/148498564
Mental health is such an important issue for so many people, yet it is still something that many find hard to talk about. Music on the Mind is powerful, profound and ultimately so hopeful and uplifting, that we think it will inspire all who hear it. We are thrilled to be able to bring it to a new and much larger audience so that it gets the wider attention it deserves. But we need to fill Shoreditch Town Hall and would really appreciate your help in getting the message out. Please spread the word – via your friends, your Twitter followers, anyone you know who might be interested – and do encourage them to come!
We also have a funding gap of roughly £8,000 which we are hoping to fill via many small donations from well-wishers. We have a JustGiving page: https://www.justgiving.com/campaign/musiconthemind and choir members have already raised around £9,000. But making a recording is an expensive undertaking, so we are seeking additional sponsorship from around 50 people willing to donate £100 or more to the project. With Gift Aid, that should get us ‘over the line’. We would, with your agreement, acknowledge all sponsorship in our programme and/or recognise someone to whom you might want to dedicate this gift. If your place of work wanted to help us, we would be happy to include their logo and/or a small advert.
In order to make a donation you can either go to our JustGiving page or get in touch with us direct via VH email voxhollowayn7@gmail.com. This could be helpful if we need to take steps to ensure that we can claim Gift Aid of 20% – it makes a huge difference. CHECK – is this the best approach?
Time is short – hence this ‘crowd-funding appeal’. But we are confident it wouldn’t take much to get us ‘over the line’ and to ensure that this beautiful, poignant and important work has a life beyond our live performance in November.
Many thanks
Tricia Zipfel
Chair Vox Holloway (or send as a personal letter from you……….I think it should come from a named person rather than read like a ‘corporate circular’)
Vox Holloway 