If you want to play at ADAR.

ADAR is a small festival in villages in Asturias, in the north of Spain. We play in hórreos — the raised stone granaries you see all over the region — in Romanesque churches, in a monastery, in palaces and in the open air. There is almost never a stage and almost never any amplification: you play inside a stone building that has been standing for eight hundred years and the sound is what it is. That decides what fits far more than the genre label does.

We programme classical and chamber music, early music — on historical instruments or not — jazz, experimental, electronic, traditional music and music from other cultures, and contemporary composition. Also things that are not exactly a concert: sound walks, installations, projects with video or with dance. If it is conceived for a particular place, better still, because that is how we work ourselves.

What we do not programme is rock, pop and commercial music. It is not a judgement on anyone: it just does not work in the places we play. If you are not sure whether your thing belongs here, send it anyway and I will look.

Let me save you some time with something that does not always get said. The festival is kept going largely by grants for the development of the arts in rural areas. That is not paperwork: it is what ADAR is. And it means that a concert on its own is much harder for me to make the case for than a project that also leaves something behind here.

What stands the best chance, roughly in this order:

• Coming a few days earlier to work in the village. We have a residency house in Leiguarda. A group that arrives, stays, rehearses, tries things out and then plays is nothing like a group that arrives in the afternoon and leaves at night. You can hear it in the concert.
• A programme thought out for the place. It does not need reinventing: sometimes it is just choosing different repertoire knowing you will be playing in a twelfth-century church and not in a concert hall.
• Something with the people who live here. A workshop, an open rehearsal, an hour with the children at the school or with the older people in the village. It does not have to be complicated; it just has to be thought through rather than tacked on at the last minute.
• A connection with Asturias, with rural heritage or with the memory of the place — in the repertoire, in the material, or in who you collaborate with.

You do not need all four. One, properly thought out, is plenty.

This interests me a great deal and almost nobody proposes it. If as well as playing you run a venue, a concert series or a festival, tell me in your first email. The format that works best for us is an exchange: you come and play at ADAR, and one of our musicians goes to play at your place.

That way the travel is shared between two programmes instead of falling entirely on one, and both of us open up a circuit. It makes no difference whether you are just down the road, anywhere in Europe or on the other side of the world — we have worked with all three. Tell me what space you have, when you programme and what kind of room it is, and let's talk.

1. Who you are and how many of you come

   The name, the line-up, how many people would travel, where you are from, and your website if you have one. How many of you come matters more than it sounds: out here, beds and a van count.

2. Something I can listen to

   A link: YouTube, Vimeo, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, your own site. Please do not send attachments, they get stuck in the mail.

   And if you have a choice, send me video of a concert: one whole piece or movement, no cuts, with an audience in front of you. It tells me far more than a carefully produced studio recording. I want to hear how you sound in a room.

3. What you want to play

   The works, with composers and durations, and how long the whole thing runs. If you have several programmes, send them all: it helps me place you in one venue or another.

4. Four lines about yourselves

   Four lines will do. If you have a long dossier, send the link, but the email should make sense without opening it.

5. The fee

   This is the thing most often left out and the thing I most need. Without a fee I cannot assess anything, and it forces me to write and ask.

   Tell me the all-in fee, whether it includes VAT, and whether it covers travel, beds and food, and for how many people. And if you have mobility funding from your country or an institution, say so: it changes the whole conversation.

6. What you need technically

   Whether you need a piano or harpsichord and what kind, amplification, light, power, projection, how much space. A lot of our venues are granaries and churches with no installation of any kind, so this sometimes decides whether a proposal is possible at all.

7. Which August dates you can do

   The festival is in August. Tell me which days you have free and whether there is any give. And if you are already touring the north of Spain around then, say so: sometimes that is exactly what makes the numbers work.

8. A phone number

   I work by email and I prefer email. But leave me your number anyway: once a proposal is moving, whatever is left to settle gets settled in five minutes on the phone. I will call you.

Send me your whole roster, with the same details as above for each artist. But send it filtered, and I mean this: if a list of twenty artists arrives with no criteria behind it, I skim it and close it. If three arrive that you have chosen thinking about this festival, I look at them one by one and I reply.

For each one I need the fee and the August dates they genuinely have free, not a generic availability. And if any of your artists work in residency, in unusual spaces or with communities, put that in the first line: those stand the best chance of getting in.

One email per submission, with the same subject line. If you want to add someone later, reply on that same thread so it does not scatter.

I read everything and I listen to everything. But I do not reply to everything, and I would rather say so here than leave you waiting for an answer that never comes. There are very few of us, and the festival is produced by the same hands that read the email; replying one by one would take weeks I do not have.

No reply does not mean I did not like it. It means it did not fit that year. I keep every proposal and look at them again when I put each edition together: some that did not fit have come in two years later, or have come in suddenly because a new venue appeared that suited them. That is why it is worth writing even when there is no open call.

And the other thing I owe you up front: this is a small festival with a small budget. I cannot pay what a large festival pays, and I would rather you knew before you waste your time. That is why I ask for the fee in the first email — that way we both know straight away whether there is room to talk.

That is all. If you have got this far, write to me.

Guillermo Laporta
Festival ADAR · Leiguarda, Asturias

leiguardamusic@gmail.com →