Legacy Arts and Cultural Heritage

My goal is to create a suite of solo guitar renditions of 20th Century Russian compositions that will make this music accessible to a new generation of guitarists and their audiences. I will perform this music in concert throughout the United States and abroad; I will notate it and publish it on my web site so that other guitarists may perform and record it; and I will record it for the enjoyment of audiences and individuals. My records are frequently played on radio stations around the world. I know this because I have conducted ''on air'' interviews during the course of this programming from Israel and Australia to England and France, among others.The completion of this project alone will be a measure of my success, although there are many other benchmarks I hope to achieve. I would consider reviews by established on-line and print media of the CD and published works to be a measure of their acceptance. The success of this project will also be calculated by CD and Book sales and downloads, radio airplay, placement in online music streaming sites such as iTunes, Pandora, Spotify and Last.fm, and views of video selections on YouTube. Sales of CDs and books can only be projected since the project is not anticipated to be published within the yearlong timeline of the grant. When the recording is released, I would expect to sell initially 200 to 1,000 CDs and a minimum of 40 books and 100 digital downloads in the first year of publication. Internet metrics are more immediate. For example, a video selection from my Post-Modern Fingerstyle Blues guitar course was just released on December 5th and has had 4,500 views as of Dec 12. My Mississippi Blues YouTube video was posted in 1997 and now has more than half a million views.