If you are reading this, you are probably familiar with us already, but just in case you're not, welcome! Ensemble Affect is an ensemble specializing in the historically-informed performance of 17th & 18th century music. Born in Chicago in 2019, we now also have a home in the Bay Area, with members spread across the country. We are committed to making this music accessible to a wide audience, and we need your help to make this possible!

The 2024-25 season was an exciting one for us. In Chicago, we brought our Dance in Venice show to new life in collaboration with our friend Phil Martini and pmdance, as well as expanding our accompanying children's show "The Adventures of Harlequin," and soft-launching our new program "Home Away from Home" (an exploration of immigrant voices, both historical and modern) on the Landowska Harpsichord Society series. Perhaps most thrillingly, in March, we made our debut on the San Francisco Early Music Society's concert series with the "Home Away from Home" program, and in May, returned to the Bay Area for "Music and Rhyme," part of our family concerts series that featured a poetry contest for area students. 

Carrying that momentum forward, we began our current season with our first-ever professional video/audio recording projects: in Chicago with Greg Levinson and his team, and in San Francisco with Zach Miley, both great experiences that provided us with much-needed promotional materials for upcoming program concepts, to enable us to reach out to concert presenters across the country as we continue to expand our audience. Following closely on the heels of those recordings, Affect was part of a collaboration with SF-based Friction Quartet that combined period instruments with contemporary composition. Most recently, we presented two candlelit performances in the Bay Area of our program "Love and Joy," an intimate concert of Italian baroque music for lute, strings, and voices. The ensemble returns to Chicago in March for concerts on the Landowska Harpsichord Society series, as well as our debut performance with Ars Musica Chicago. 

For our 2025-26 season and beyond, we have some big goals, including a new "colonial baroque" program we hope to bring to college and university campuses and established concert series around the country. In celebration of the nation's 250th birthday, this program will present the works of  composers who lived and worked in the United States around the time of its founding. We will introduce this program on our Bay Area family concert series in May/June, and hopefully present it several more times in the summer and fall of 2026.

We also hope to incorporate as a non-profit organization within the year, which we anticipate will be lots of work, and will stretch us in new directions, but will also hopefully enable us to continue to do this work we love in a sustainable way for years to come.

Why are we asking for your donations? While we are working hard to secure other sources of funding (grants, payments from established concert series, etc), self-producing concerts is an expensive endeavor! In addition to the costs of venue and equipment rentals, recording fees, etc, our members are all busy working musicians who take time away from teaching and other work to participate in our performances, and we are committed to compensating our musicians fairly for their time and expertise.

Of course, if you are unable to support us financially at this time, there are many other ways to get involved! Maybe you have professional expertise that would be useful on a non-profit board, or would be willing to host visiting musicians in your home, or to be event staff at our concerts (taking tickets and donations at the door, moving equipment), or provide refreshments for after-concert receptions. Or maybe some other helpful gesture we haven't thought of yet! Get in touch with us today at ensembleaffect@proton.me. We'd love to hear from you.

And from all of us at Ensemble Affect, THANK YOU. We look forward to sharing more music with you this season, and in seasons to come!