This guest blog is by Andrew Snell, Head of Performing Arts at Ara
Today (June 21) is World Music Day. For most of us, even those of us that are musicians, it’s a day that often goes by relatively unnoticed. Sadly, in 2020 it will barely register. You see, the main aim of World Music Day is to celebrate with free performances in large, public spaces; the very spaces in which audiences across the globe are not currently able to gather.
Covid-19 has all but killed off the global live performance industry. Cameron Mackintosh, one of the most successful producers of musical theatre has said that his four most successful West End shows won’t return to their London Theatres until 2021. Opera companies in the US are not planning to return to the stage until April next year. Some of the world’s leading orchestras are unlikely to survive without audiences. None of the world’s pop stars can tour.
Musicians around the world were familiar with the ‘gig economy’ well before it became a thing. The concept of the gig economy was founded on the way most musicians live; from gig to gig. Freelance musicians have seen almost all their work disappear from their diaries. But we’re a resilient and creative lot, us musicians!
Technology enables us to work in a different way, from isolated locations around the globe. A friend of mine from the UK received a text at 10pm while she was playing trombone in a west-end show (pre-lockdown). The text asked if she could record the trombone track for a TV commercial? No problem. By midnight? She finished the show, went to her camper van (where she had her laptop), sat in an empty carpark at 11.30, recorded a couple of takes and emailed them off by tethering her laptop to her mobile. The following morning, she turned on the TV and heard the track she’d recorded 10 hours earlier on a supermarket Christmas TV ad!
At Ara we have a responsibility to enable our students to embrace these challenges. Technology is embedded within our Music Arts programmes and the laptop is becoming as important an instrument as the guitar, bass or drums. Live performance, with human interaction will never be replaced as the main motivation for both performers and audiences, but this use of technology is an ever-growing part of the ‘gig’.
Here in Aotearoa we’re lucky to be able to restart our live performance industry. Music Arts students are playing to live audiences again, and we’ve already staged two productions at the National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art (NASDA), with a 3rd opening next week. During lock-down, our 200 performing arts students were able to connect with their tutors for instrumental or singing lessons online, NASDA students learned entire shows in isolation, then pieced them together once we returned to campus. Music Arts students created music projects by collaborating with each other online.
Music is arguably the art form that most influences our lives. We hear music every day; on the radio, on the TV, on our phones and in the street. Music triggers memories; of weddings, funerals, of events, significant or insignificant. We listen to music to relax, to brighten our days and to grieve. This is one reason why every Ara graduation ceremony contains music. NASDA students were due to perform at the Ara graduation ceremony earlier this year. When it was cancelled, and we went into lock-down we decided to perform anyway. Over a period of a few weeks, 80 NASDA students learned, practiced, and recorded their own individual parts for the song they would have sung to honor the graduates. These 80 individual recordings were then balanced, synchronised and eventually brought together in this video. Happy World Music Day. The music industry may be battered and bruised, but we’ll be back, and we’ll continue to write the soundtrack of your lives!
Every year many thousands of critically endangered Albatross, Shearwaters and Petrels are caught as a by-catch of commercial fishing activities. This had become such a critical issue that an international agreement was signed by 13 nations on the 19th June 2019 to improve the protection of these species.
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