The Weill Project blog: Welcome!

Welcome to the Weill Project blog. You may want to join our Facebook group: that will alert you when we have new posts here, and also let you know about other things happening in our orbit.

The Weill Project is dedicated to the work of the German (later American) composer Kurt Weill. Our primary focus is to create and perform original arrangements of Weill's songs. The Project also includes critical and historical study of Weill's work and of "Weill-adjacent" work. We expect our tours to include both concerts and lecture/demonstrations. Plans also include visual art related to or inspired by Weill and his songs.

We plan to post new content to the Weill Project Blog at least twice a month, maybe more. (It's ended up being pretty much weekly. - JM 6 Oct 2021.) This blog will focus on:

Progress of the Weill Project, including posting songs we've recorded.
Upcoming events and performances.
Miscellaneous content about Kurt Weill. (This has been turning into pretty thorough biographies of Weill and Lotte Lenya, in installments. - JM 6 Oct 2021)
"Weill-adjacent content"
Other news about the participants in the Weill Project

That last is pretty elastic: we each have a rather broad set of interests:

Project founder Joe Mabel (Seattle) is a vocalist/guitarist/arranger, and is also our webmaster with 40 years experience in the software industry, a writer (both a songwriter and a major contributor and admin at the English-languqage Wikipedia), a visual artist, and an award-winning photographer (major contributor and admin at Wikimedia Commons; honored by DoCoMoMo WeWa for his photographic documentation of Mid-Century Modern architecture in the Pacific Northwest).
Juliana Brandon (Seattle) is an operatic soprano, and is also a visual artist (you can view and purchase her art at http://birdsforbrains.com 🔗), author (Winter from Above: Meditations on Winterreise with Franz Schubert, her "dark, sexy musical fairy tale"), and the founder of Paper Puppet Opera 🔗, which combines vocal performance (hers and others) with shadow puppetry (her puppets, sometimes supplemened by more puppeteers). She was also a member of the late lamented Operadisiac, a perfomrming group that combined opera and burlesque.
Yvette Endrijautzki (Wuppertal), probably best known as a sculptor, is involved in the Weill Project mainly as a visual artist, but is also a gallerist (most notably, she founded Nautilus Studio 🔗 in Seattle in 2009 and moved it to her native Wupppertal in 2017), singer, fire performer, dancer and acrobat (she competed on the German junior national team in Rhythmic Sport Gymnastics, 1986), prop designer, etc., etc., etc. She is also the designer of the Farrago Spiritum Tarot 🔗, based on the body of acquired knowledge of American astrologer Raven Bella Zingaro.

And then there's politics. So while Kurt Weill and the Weill Project will be the main focus of this blog, don't be too surprised if it occasionally gets a bit far afield.

Next blog post: Kurt Weill and John Cale

Original date: 8 March 2021
Last modified: 18 December 2021

Please send email for the Weill Project to theweillproject@gmail.com. Normally, we check this at least every 48 hours. Or you can follow us at The Weill Project Facebook group.