Since 2006, founding director Lynn Hutchinson has been offering a new type of concert: entertainment fused with interactive learning. From Bohemian Rhapsody to Rachmaninoff, Umm Kulthum to Robert Johnson, Canvas takes audiences under the hood for a deeper understanding.
Canvas has collaborated with a hundred musicians, artists, and scientists to offer audiences thirty of these programs. Over two thousand different audience members have attended our intimate Lab series. Canvas programs have been featured in theaters, schools, community centers across the United States.
Canvas is currently engaged in large-scale development of its flagship project Meeting the Ghosts: Big Lies and a Lost Musical Village.
“Music gives us a chance to learn about each other. Rhythms and melodies are the sounds of somebody else’s life.”
Why music? Why this music? Why now? As a lecturer, collaborative pianist, arranger, and theorist, Lynn has spent a lifetime platforming artists and audiences to better understand music. Her musical journey began as a self-taught pianist, influenced by musical grandparents, helpful school teachers, musical theater, and church music. What she lacked in technical guidance she made up for by throwing herself into every musical opportunity she could find or create. By age 14, she was writing instrumental and choral arrangements, performing original pieces, and working professionally as an accompanist.
The piano bench gave Lynn a front row seat from which to observe musicians in various settings and witness how music impacted audiences differently; the physical engagement of audiences with pop music versus the quiet intellectual intake of classical ones. She also observed boundaries between musicians of different specialties, and how rarely folks tended to cross lines in the performance types they preferred.
This early influx of musical diversity drives a desire to share unique musical experience with audiences.