Musical Advent Calendar 2025
Brighten your December with daily music from Guts!
Whether it’ll bring moments of holiday joy or moments of respite from a stressful season, treat yourself (and your loved ones!) to a special Advent calendar with a micro-concert video each day.
In the spirit of mystery, we won’t give away in advance which pieces you’ll hear, but we’ve had a great time choosing them and can’t wait to share them with you! We will tell you that it’ll be a mix of music, baroque stuff in several different styles for most of the month and some carols and holiday songs in the last couple of days.
Featuring Guts and friends:
John Ross, traverso (baroque flute)
Sylvia Schwartz, baroque violin
Rebecca Shaw, baroque cello and viola da gamba
Andrus Madsen, harpsichord and organ
Phoebe Durand-McConnell, baroque triple harp
Send us a donation of any amount $20–$100 and you’ll receive a daily email with a new micro-concert video from December 1st to 25th. Daily videos will be about 2–5min each, with a slightly longer one for Christmas Day.
After you open them, videos will continue to be available through the end of January—in case you need some music to brighten the quiet of post-holiday time, as we settle in to winter.
Makes a great gift! Just tell us in the checkout form where we should send it.
Gifting to multiple people? Make a total donation that reflects the number of recipients (you choose the amount that works for you), and put all the email addresses into the form.
*Donations are not tax-deductible, but they do make everything we do possible!
As Guts grows with an expanded roster of performers, your financial support is deeply appreciated; a great way to help us is with a monthly donation via Patreon. Single donations are also gratefully accepted using the blue button on this page.
Guts Baroque brings beautiful and unusual music that we love from the 17th and 18th centuries to your ears, illuminating the stories behind the music and its makers and celebrating the warmth and vividness of historically-informed chamber music played on period instruments.
We are Sylvia Schwartz, baroque violinist, Rebecca Shaw, baroque cellist and gambist, and John Ott, baroque cellist and gambist. Since teaming up, we have learned, performed, and recorded music together, sharing gems of repertoire with people looking for connection and beauty from Southern California to Maine.
We want to create more time in our professional lives for performing, to build on what we’ve been able to do over the past six years. We’d like to welcome you into our world, where we: find scores, try them out, decide if we like them, put hours of work into deeply understanding them and training our muscles to perform them clearly with our instruments, and present them through live performances and polished recordings.
We laugh, we swear, we sweat, we face our own flaws to grow to the next level up the endless mountain of the musician’s life.
Join us to learn more about what we do, enjoy the fruits of our labor, and help us eat under a roof while we do it.
Your presence in our Patreon community of support enables us to spend time practicing, finding new repertoire, and preparing new concert programs, in addition to all the administrative work that enables us to play in-person concerts and help people find us for the first time. It relieves pressure to rack up “billable hours” teaching, designing websites, and other projects that are often unrelated to or in conflict with the work of finding, learning, and performing music in historical style.
Our performances have been received with such warmth. We play off-the-beaten-path music with heart and a spirit of healing. If you’re new here, welcome, and we’re so happy to share all this with you!
Guts Baroque Duo 