The Common Tone Music Festival is a series of multi-evening and a day-long chamber music festival rooted in the Moscow/Pullman Palouse region in early summer.

In our recent post-pandemic era, we are planning to host this event at the Palouse Clearwater Environmental Institute in Moscow, ID. We have a special donor and preview event in Pullman at the wonderful Merry Cellars Winery! We aspire to host our events in a way that supports and augments local businesses. This year, Colter’s Creek Winery and Moscow Brewing together with many food vendors will be supported by the festival.

Check our event schedules for details!

YES! Our goal is to make this music and festival available for free to everyone. As such, we will ask for donations from the community to help subsidize and support the festival, the creation of new works, and the performances by professional musicians. We even have fancy cups to buy to help support that gets you discounted beer and wine!

YES! Our events are all ages and open to the community. All events listed are all-ages unless otherwise noted.

PCEI has limited parking. We will have a parking attendant to help but know that once the parking is full, we will have to park cars on the main street with a short walk to the site. Drop offs and handicap parking always available.

We have 40-50 chairs under a pergola for first-come seating. Otherwise, bring a lawn chair or a blanket and there will be room for all!

We will have food vendors available, but food is welcome. Please help support our local businesses!

Most of the music we program would be considered classical or jazz chamber music. Most of our groups are acoustic musicians who come from a strong background of craft while pushing the boundaries of our boxed in genres. While every musician you hear is a trained professional musician, the genres of the 21st century have blurred so much that what we formally called classical or jazz music is fuzzy. Today, we prefer to just call it music.

The Music Festival is run by and for musicians and the communities we serve.

Audience Development: Our goal is to raise enough support to underwrite the festival so that the Common Tone Music Festival events can be open and free to the public. Our underlying goal is to spread live, local, thoughtful, and creative music into the community and build audience to both arts and music enthusiasts and those who are new to chamber music.

Support Northwest Artists: The Common Tone Music Festival will deliberately be a platform for Northwest Musicians. Focusing on NW Artists is not only important in resource stewardship, but is also an important part of our mission. Embedded in communities all through the Northwest corridor are quality established music ensembles who have strong local communities to support their events, but struggle to find a platform for developing a larger audience.

Support local business and commerce: We believe that the Festival will become a destination draw to the Moscow community and Palouse region. With the festival sitting solidly in early Summer, the Festival could help to support hotels, restaurants, and shops while the draw of the University is less poignant. Further, our events will be underwritten by the festival and will bring audience out into downtown Moscow/Pullman and into local businesses.

Define Chamber Music for the 21st Century. What is chamber music anyway? Chamber Music America defines chamber music as "music composed for small ensembles, with one musician per part, generally performed without a conductor. The term once referred only to Western classical music for small ensembles, such as string quartets. But today chamber music encompasses myriad forms, including contemporary and traditional jazz, classical, and world genres." Certainly, the Beethoven String Quartets are included in this definition, but come discover how Chamber Music can be so much more…