Choose à la Carte from Music Arts
By Sally Hunter Jensen

“Cedar City Music Arts à la Carte”! The title for the 2007-08 season has a rhythmical ring to it and was chosen because our 79th season promises a full-course entertainment meal! Each of the seven concerts have diverse musical flavors. The Cedar City Music Arts (CCMA) board is continually brewing musical menus. Welcome CCMA patrons, past, present and future to season 79. May you leave each concert satisfied with the fare.

Ordering à la Carte has only one drawback: All diners know that if they order from the menu à la Carte, their dinner will be more expensive.This is also true of our menu but we have a solution to this dilemma. There are seven concerts and if you were to pay individually to attend each one it would cost you $160. The $70 season ticket is less than half.

However, à la Carte also implies that a customer has choices and can select what they want to sample.This is the angle for this season’s theme. Beginning Friday Oct. 5, 2007, with The Utah Symphony, the carefully prepared entrees that follow are the Escher String Quartet, The Three Irish Tenors, The Angeli Duo, The Lowe Family, “Little Women-The Broadway Musical,” and Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, which concludes the season’s menu on Tuesday, April 29, 2008.

This is a theme in which I have some expertise. Between teaching jobs and my education, I managed to amass 17 years in the restaurant business. Here are my thoughts, strewn with perhaps too many restaurant metaphors. CCMA has “regulars,” our patrons, and they are our bread and butter. If you choose to “dine” with us you won’t get an overcooked or underdone concert. We import the highest quality performers and the quality is always four-star. The service is always professional and you get generous servings of meaty, musical, meals. The venue is the tasteful Heritage Center Theater. Perhaps I’ve overdone the musical meal metaphors. This is what happens when there are so many tempting treats before you. You want to sample them all, share them with your best friends and then go back for seconds. Remember, “Music Arts à la Carte has no calories and will only fatten your soul!

We’d like to attract new customers to partake of our season and to appeal to fine musical diners from other parts of the country that have moved to southern Utah. We welcome young southern Utah professionals, and “hungry” folks from all walks of life who have not yet discovered the CCMA seven-course season. If you have an “ear” for fine musical dining, CCMA offers seven courses and that doesn’t count our actual meal, “The Symphony Soiree,” before The Utah Symphony, the first concert of the season.

À la Carte means that you can fashion your entertainment schedule according to your own tastes, choosing from seven delicious performances. We hope you will join us at all seven, but even if you choose to attend a few, the season ticket price is still the most economical at $70. So, southern Utahns, we extend this invitation to come "dine" with us à la Carte!