Akropolis Receives New Music USA Grant for Sprocket

We are super excited to have been awarded our first ever grant from New Music USA in support of ⚙ Sprocket by Steven Snowden which combines the reed quintet with a ridable percussion bicycle built by Detroit metal fabricator Juan Martinez!

We had an absolute blast premiering this work at Wasserman Projects and Kerrytown Concert House during our Together We Sound festival this June, and then again at the Mostly Modern Festival in Saratoga Springs, New York. We can’t wait to keep Sprocket rolling 🚲around the country during our 10th anniversary season this year.

New Music USA awarded $529,420 in funding supporting new American music projects in 27 states. The 114 awarded projects include a wide range of activities and events involving new music as a central element; many projects involve collaborations in dance, theater, opera, and the visual arts.

To read more about Sprocket, visit Akropolis’ website here, and to see ongoing project updates, visit our New Music USA project profile here.

New Music USA’s platform offers important promotional tools for artists that extend the program’s service beyond financial support. As part of the application process, artists create project pages that include narrative descriptions and media samples. Project updates from the artists, and the interaction with followers, assist artists in engaging with the broader community and allow the public to experience new work in development.

Interim CEO Deborah Steinglass commented, “This current round of project grants demonstrates not only an enormous breadth and depth of creative work in the United States today, it also speaks to the importance of artists to our society as a whole. These projects touch upon the core of what it means to be human by stimulating our intellects, evoking our internal emotions, creating respite from our daily lives, raising our consciousness around themes of social justice and equality, and so much more; artists are in fact serving as agents of change. I can’t wait to experience the art created from this round of project grants, and it’s my hope that many others will explore and experience this work as well, and make new art a part of their daily lives.”