Welcome to Skipton Music 2023/2024

If you are new to Skipton Music, then please allow us to introduce ourselves: founded in 1947, we are a not-for-profit charity run by a team of local volunteers. Each year we organise six world-class chamber music concerts on Tuesday evenings between September and March at the magnificently refurbished Skipton Town Hall.

Our concerts typically showcase a wide variety of ensembles and solo musicians, with repertoire ranging from early music through to contemporary. In recent years we’ve particularly enjoyed introducing our audiences to works they might not have heard before, as was the case with last season’s highly successful 75th anniversary series featuring some of the many ‘hidden treasures’ produced by women composers across the ages.

For 2023/2024, we’re delighted once again to be welcoming internationally renowned artists alongside ‘rising star’ performers. As we’re always keen to include the greatest possible range of instruments, this season also features a particularly impressive array of strings, brass and woodwind as well as voice, piano and more than 30 different types of recorder! The repertoire is equally varied with music from Bach to Britten, Dowland to Debussy, Clara Schumann to Kurt Weill, together with living composers such as Clarice Assad, Mogens Andresen and Valerie Coleman.

If you like the look of this year’s concerts, please do consider buying a season ticket. After the disruption of the pandemic combined with the current challenges of the ‘cost-of-living crisis’, your season tickets provide us with a stable financial platform to continue supporting professional musicians as well as enhancing the cultural life of Skipton and the surrounding areas. Buying a ticket for the full season in advance also gives you all six concerts for the price of approximately four single tickets and guarantees you the same seat for every performance. I am pleased to say that, after gradually building back our audiences to pre-pandemic levels over the past twelve months, this year we have been able to keep our ticket prices the same as last season, including substantial reductions for children and under-30s.

Finally, the concerts we promote rely for their continued success on the practical expertise and skills of our volunteers, as well as their willingness to commit their time and enthusiasm. In the coming year we are keen to recruit individuals with relevant know-how in marketing, communications and fundraising. In addition we’d welcome offers of help over the summer with the distribution of our brochures, posters and flyers. If you think you could lend a hand, please do get in touch at skiptonmusic@gmail.com

Frank Finlay
Chair of Skipton Music