Case Study - Norfolk Chamber Music Festival
- Assignment: Develop an identity to promote Yale's Summer School of Music while at the same time introduce Chamber Music to a new and contemporary audience.
- Support: From seasonal residents like Mark Twain and the Tokyo String Quartet to the rich perennial community of writers, musicians and painters, Norfolk has a wealth of artists from which to draw talent and inspiration.
- Mythology: Collaborator and local artist Ken Musselman took inspiration from Pierre Seurat's pointillism masterpiece "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" for the first community inspired Festival theme. His work, A Sunday Afternoon in Norfolk, like the Festival itself is fanciful and folksy yet complex and layered. Musselman's playful interpretation helped capture the right tone for the concert series by whimsically replacing prominent subjects in Seurat's meticulous landscape with a bevy of frogs handsomely personified and enjoying a summer concert in Norfolk. Like the Seurat's ensemble of miniature dots, the Festival's visuals and signage placed throughout the venue in concert with the promotional and collateral materials echo the bone touching Chamber Music overlaid against the late evening chorus of a thousand frogs, creating a tour de force in the lazy, sweet summer air.
