It has been a true honor to be in-residence with Musica Sierra the past few years in Northern California. San Francisco Classical Voice‘s Jeff Kaliss has a must-read look at the organization, composer JJ Hollingsworth, and the residency program:

Drive up Route 80 to the mountain city of Truckee. And then, instead of making a right turn toward the crowded ski slopes and casinos of Tahoe, take a left along the winding road that leads into Sierra, the second-least-populated county in the state of California. Splendid surprises await you there, among them, this week, a series of public concerts and master classes involving the county’s schoolchildren, a visiting concert pianist, and nature-inspired works by a San Francisco composer.

The series is dubbed “Children Under the Blue Dome,” in reference both to the public school students of Sierra County, who’ll witness and participate in the musical offerings, and to the featured world premiere of JJ Hollingsworth’s piano suite Under the Blue Dome. The week of music is produced by Musica Sierra, whose stated mission is “to enrich the cultural experience of Sierra County with world-class, year-round performances and musical education, accessible and affordable for all.”

The organization was founded in 2019 by husband and wife Owen and Lindsay McIntosh. The couple met in college at Cal State Stanislaus. She’d grown up in Truckee; he was raised in similarly remote and mountainous Trinity County, west of Redding.…