We’re starting a series of blog posts where we feature host facilities from our Con Edison Musicians’ Residency: Composition Program.  We’ll be highlighting the physical features (and photos) of these facilities. The Con Edison Musicians’ Residency offers three months of free workspace and a $1,000 stipend to eight NYC-based composers.  Residencies will run from this September through the end of November, and one from January, ’12 through the end of March.

Flushing Town Hall is a beautiful Civil War-era building, which houses the Flushing Council on Culture and the Arts. (The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke there in 1865.  The area is also home to the Flushing Remonstrance, “perhaps the earliest demand for religious freedom” made by American colonists.) By the 1980s, the building had fallen on neglect and hard times, but the City of New York restored it and returned it to public use. Flushing Town Hall is in the Cultural Institutions Group; City-owned properties which receive support through the Department of Cultural Affairs.

This is our third year with Flushing Town Hall.  We love working with the staff and couldn’t be more excited to continue this partnership.

Do you know any composers? If you do, let them know about this program. The Flushing Town Hall residencies are for Queens residents only, but other facilities are open to other boroughs.  A space this beautiful deserves great music.