Life, like music, requires improvisation. When Lindsay McIntosh returned home from a successful career as a globetrotting musician, she had no idea she’d be spearheading a movement to foster the arts in rural Sierra County. Now, as the executive director of Musica Sierra, she is helping to reimagine California cowboy country as a sanctuary for cultural innovation.
“My greatest hope is for Sierra Valley to become a cultural hub of musical arts and education that visitors want to experience.” –Lindsay McIntosh
After growing up in Truckee and studying music at California State University in Stanislaus, McIntosh journeyed east to master modern oboe at Boston University. This led to further study in historical performance at the Julliard School in New York where she formed critically-acclaimed renaissance rebirth group New Vintage Baroque.
Watch The Digital Stage Series
McIntosh toured Japan and Europe before a job offer at Tahoe Classical in Incline Village, Nev., lured her home.
Yet, it was only a year later when she left her position as deputy director in a move to deliver music to the tightknit pastoral villages tucked away in the mountains and valleys north of Truckee. She now lives in Loyalton with her husband Owen, a classically trained opera singer, who teaches music at Truckee Elementary School, and their 2-year-old son.
With a grant from Firefly Scientists Foundation, McIntosh founded Musica Sierra to bring the performing arts and music education to Sierra County, a bucolic region known more for ranching than Rachmaninov. With a headcount barely more than 3,000, it is the second least populated county in California, second only to mountainous Alpine County south of Lake Tahoe.
Musical Headwaters
“The Rivers Are Our Brothers”
June 4 | 6 p.m. | Nevada Museum of Art | Reno, Nev.
June 5 | 6 p.m. | Lost Marbles Ranch | Beckwourth
By the end of her first concert at Lost Marbles Ranch in Beckwourth, McIntosh knew she was onto something special.
“We had ranchers there, we had cowboys there,” she says. “They didn’t care that we were from New York and Julliard grads. They were just so happy to be at an event doing something together. Everyone was so open arms. It’s such a small, beautiful community that we can make something niche and impactful.”
Sharing the magic of music
The nonprofit began its mission in February 2020 just in time for the coronavirus pandemic to halt in-person learning and live performance. That’s when McIntosh got creative, which frankly is what she does best. She began hosting a Digital Stage Series, which virtually transported a diverse array of performing artists from Bushwick rapper Scienze to orchestral harpist Ashley Jackson into the classrooms of Sierra-Plumas Joint Unified School District.
With help from Sierra County Arts Council, the Sierra Schools Foundation and First 5 Sierra, Musica Sierra now offers free community music classes throughout the region.
“Music is the only thing that uses both sides of the brain,” says McIntosh. “There is just so much development that happens from listening and being exposed to it.”
Last month, live performances resumed with a presentation of Ugandan drummer Michael Muyanja and the Washoe Tribe’s Red Hoop Singers at Sierra Valley Event Center in Loyalton.
This week will mark the first installment of Musical Headwaters, an ongoing series that brings the musicians and composers of New Vintage Baroque to the Middle Fork of the Feather River to compose and perform works in reflection of the natural world.
On June 4 and 5, Berkeley-based vocalist Majel Connery, Canadian violinist Edwin Huizinga and Pennsylvanian bassoonist Ben Matus will take audiences on first-person sonic experience of the Sierra Valley landscape in the world premiere of electronic song cycle, “The Rivers Are Our Brothers.”
Written by Connery, the cycle is based on a quote from Native American leader Chief Seattle, who believed that people must relate to the environment in the same way they do close kin. Each song begins with “I am a river,” or “I am rain,” giving the power of first-person speech to these integral elements of the Sierra Nevada landscape.
“Majel sounds like Björk meets Imogen Heap meets Maria Callas,” says McIntosh. “What she does is moving and people love it. She can get up and sing Bach, but what you really want to hear is her original stuff.”
The program includes nature-themed pieces arranged for Baroque violin and bassoon including Handel’s “Watermusik” and Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” During the week surrounding the public concerts, the musicians will share interactive performances with the classrooms of Sierra County.
“My greatest hope is for Sierra Valley to become a cultural hub of musical arts and education that visitors want to experience,” says McIntosh. “People come here for biking and birding and public lands. Why not have it also be a haven for arts you cannot get anywhere else?” | musicasierra.org
