The organizers of the annual Watertown MusicFest were not going to let COVID-19 stand in the way of putting on their 2020 event. They put together a virtual musical jamboree featuring more than 100 performances by Watertown students and others from the community.
The event was created by the Friends of Watertown Music, a group of volunteer parents and friends of the music program that formed in 2011 to support and advocate for the music program in the Watertown Public Schools.
The organizers wrote the following introduction for the Watertown Music Fest website (Click here to go to the website):
“Corona may be keeping us apart but it isn’t keeping us silent.
The music lives within us, bringing us laughter, joy, strength and solace.
The Watertown Public Schools Fine, Applied and Performing Arts department in collaboration with Friends of Watertown Music invite all Watertown musicians, students, teachers, families, and community members to join us in this virtual musical celebration.“
Like the in-person festival, the virtual one is split into several rooms with a list of about two dozen performers in each (go to the Performance Schedule tab on the top menu).
There is also a section called Spotlight on Student Musicians (click Students Speak on the menu) where Watertown students talk about why they like music.
You can click on the list to see who is the musicians are, but click the name of the room to view the performance videos.
Here is a small sampling:
Members of the Watertown High School Orchestra playing Remember Me from Coco, which was dedicated to the Seniors (the video also has bios of the musicians):
A sixth-grader at Watertown Middle School teamed up with a WMS music teacher to play the Super Mario Theme Song in a clarinet duet:
A young singer performs a song by Alphabet Rockers, which is also a protest song:
There were also community members who joined in. Here a resident plays Gigue from Bach’s Cello Suite in C major on a marimba:
See all the performance at the Virtual MusicFest 2020 website: https://sites.google.com/watertown.k12.ma.us/virtualmusicfest2020/home?authuser=0