Tigertail Associates

Description

In December of 1976 a small group of professionals from the westside of Los Angeles, met over brunch and discussed the arts and technology. Many in the group had a background in computer science and there was excitement about what computers could do to help the arts. There was also dismay at what seemed to be commercialization and destruction of many musical forms and art forms. Chamber music, designed to be played in small venues, was seldom heard in them. Instead chamber music was played in large auditoriums where the music looses its context. In an analogous way the cost of art has pushed the art of painting and printmaking out of the reach of people to live with and view it as it was intended, instead it resides in museums and in inaccessible homes of the rich. The outcome of this meeting was to try and tackle the music issue first, and the first project was to get a string quartet to come and perform at a home in the area to recreate the chamber music ideal. The first concert was given by the Sequoia String Quartet. In the course of the next year, several "home" concerts were scheduled. These were given at the home of Pat Britt and Gwen Moore high up on Tigertail Drive in a home overlooking Santa Monica, West Los Angeles, and the Pacific. This provided the origin for our name. In the years that followed the concert season grew in number and in the number of people involved. Tigertail Associates became a Non-Profit California Corporation, with tax-exempt 501c3 IRS status. The succeeding decade saw the growth not only of Tigertail's concert season, but other people saw fit to start similar groups. And while the practice is still not the most common way of hearing chamber music, in Los Angeles at least, one can always join a society that has chamber concerts. Sister Mary-Ann Bonino was a leader in this movement. Contributions in succeeding years were always modest, but they allowed the music season to continue, and they funded some minor research and educational efforts in the arts. The Xerox Corporation made a major donation to make possible the development of computer art teaching tools for grammar school education. This was Project Leonardo which was done in cooperation with University Elementary School a teaching and research school located at UCLA. Today, Tigertail has a wide variety of active research projects and art appreciation projects. These include Thursday Opera Evenings, Museum support for the internet, an artist-internship program for learning web site design, and with this web site a new venue for education in music and art. This Tigertail web site is dedicated to introducing a new way of exploring the arts. Initially it will start with an on-line guide to collecting classical music on CD and Laser Disk. This will be called the Tigertail Guide to Music (TGM). This on-line guide was written by Robert Uzgalis, our director of research and development. He hopes that this area we will become a collaborative effort. If you research and explore a composer, musical form or other specialized part of classical music we will add it to our developing guide.

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