Menu
‘Celebrating Communal Covid Creativity’ next for virtual festival
“Celebrating Communal Covid Creativity” is the theme of this week’s 7:30 p.m. Wednesday Greencastle Virtual Music Festival event,
A livestreamed discussion and performance, it is available on Zoom at http://gvmf.live, simultaneously rebroadcast at facebook.com/greencastlevirtualmusic and at youtube.gvmf.live.
This is the 26th program in the series, replays of which will be coming soon to Channel 3 on local cable services on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8 p.m. with additional times to be announced.
Festival founder and host Eric Edberg will play cello live from his home and also share a number of prerecorded videos of multi-location collaborations he has encountered online, including large-ensemble and dance performances.
“While we’ve all missed in-person concerts, human ingenuity has been in ample evidence over the past year,” Edberg said. “As many performance venues are on the verge of reopening, I thought it would be great to celebrate what people have created.”
Edberg says the intention is to make this week’s event as interactive as possible.
“Up until last week, all our events, including my comments, were prerecorded, followed by a discussion on Zoom. Last week we had a live concert and discussion with Mark and Maggie O’Connor from their living room, and I loved the interactivity. So we’ll do that again, with me playing some solo cello live and presenting some fascinating ‘musical mosaic’ pieces in which individuals recorded themselves in multiple locations and those performances were then edited together into a large-ensemble video.
“An amazing example of this,” Edberg added, “is 526 cellists from 47 countries performing ‘Saga of Harrison Crabfeathers’ by Steve Kuhn, assembled with amazing skill and care by Tony Rogers.”
The program will also include highlights from recent episodes of the Sunny Side Concert Series, a video concert series Bobbie Lancaster created and is hosting from Gobin Church for residents of local assisted-living facilities.
The Virtual Festival has been supported by the Greencastle Summer Music Festival, which Edberg founded in 2005 and held no concerts in 2020. The GSMF is anticipating a return to in-person concerts at Gobin Church in June, with details to be announced soon.
The GSMF is supported by its family of donors, an endowment at the Putnam County Community Foundation, the Putnam County Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Inn at DePauw, the Sunny Side Concert Series, and Gobin Church. Donations can be made at greencastlemusic.org/donate.