I am a Canadian violinist and composer, a Master’s of Music student at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and a recent graduate of The Glenn Gould School in Toronto. I am also the founder & director of the Suite Melody Care volunteer program.

Of all the things I had planned when COVID-19 hit,I have had to completely let go of orchestra and chamber music playing. I was studying at Rice in Houston when COVID-19 rapidly escalated and I had to return back home to Oakville, Canada. Though my academic classes and private lessons continued online for the rest of the semester, orchestra and chamber music were cancelled completely and similarly summer plans for orchestra/chamber music festivals in the U.S. and Germany have been rescheduled. I really miss the unique experience of making music together with my colleagues and, for now, I am enjoying the alternative of making recordings and syncing these together with friends.

I also run a volunteer program called Suite Melody Care (founded in 2012) which encourages young musicians and singers to give back to the community by performing in their local hospitals, retirement residences, and long-term care facilities. We give over 100 live themed, interactive performances annually for hospital patients and the elderly across Ontario, Iowa, and just recently in Houston. Unfortunately, all of these live performances have had to stop for the time being to protect our audience members and performers.

Once circumstances turn for the better, I look forward to resuming orchestra and chamber music studying, rehearsals, and performances. I will also be particularly excited for Suite Melody Care performances to continue and grow to involve many more young musicians and reach even more audience members in hospitals, retirement residences, and long-term care facilities across Canada and in the U.S.

In the meanwhile, in order to bring some happiness into the lives of hospital patients and the elderly during these challenging times, Suite Melody Care has launched a Virtual Performance video series for hospital patients and the elderly in Canada and the United States to raise their spirits. They can view these virtual performances from the safety and comfort of their own rooms and with their own personal devices.

I created the first of these videos to inspire others who will be submitting videos to me which I will be combining and sharing. We have just published the first results, “Spring Together”, a Suite Melody Care COVID Virtual Performance, on our YouTube Channel.

Suite Melody Care Inaugural COVID Virtual Performance links: Suite Melody Care Virtual Performance; "Spring Together"; Suite Melody Care website: www.suitemelodycare.com

For any musician, singer, or dancer interested in bringing some joy into the elderly and hospital patients’ lives, I would welcome you to contact me and find out how you can take part in the Suite Melody Care Virtual Performance videos. My email address is ashworthproductions@gmail.com.

NDN seeks to establish a bi-annual touring project that will allow Northern Ontarians to access world-class, professional, classical music performances and encounters in their own backyard, working closely with local arts councils and community presenters.

We were heartbroken to have to postpone our final concert of our inaugural season by the Drive Shaft Trio that would’ve included our very first commissioned piece by local Sudbury composer, Robert Lemay.

We hope to reschedule the concert to the early fall or at least to organize a digital solution to seeing the concert through.

We’re a small organization just starting out on our artistic and creative journey. We had hoped to present the concert online instead of in person but it became almost impossible logistically to make happen. We want to honour the music we have commissioned and premiering the work online, without the trio being able to properly rehearse together seems contrary to that spirit. So we have concentrated on making optimistic plans for our 2020/21 season and rolling the postponed concert into those efforts.

Sudbury, ON, is our home base of operations and where we plan our main concerts of our series and fundraising events. We are building our network of contacts around Northern Ontario for touring concerts in future seasons. Next season will see the first of our regional runout concerts attached to our main Sudbury season. We would love for any Northern Ontarians interested in interested in bringing top-level classical music and musicians to their communities to contact us at  info@northerndebutnord.com,  to visit our website at NorthernDebutNord.com, and to sign up for our newsletter to be included in our season launch announcements and kept up to date with our activities. That, and following us on social media including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

I am organist and director of music at St. Thomas’s Anglican Church, Huron Street (and in less disrupted times The WholeNote’s usual Early Music columnist).

When COVID-19 hit, I had a number of choral and solo concerts planned, as well as the responsibilities associated with Holy Week and Easter. St. Thomas’s has one of the most renowned church music programs in the country, and to miss this highlight of the year is a profound loss for all who participate in, and listen to, our choral programs.

While some of the concerts will not be rescheduled, I look forward to performing Louis Vierne’s Symphonie No. 2 as part of the RCCO Vierne birthday celebration, now in the fall (transferred from April), as well as a solo recital in Ottawa next season (transferred from May).

 With all church and choral gatherings put on hold, I have had to adapt accordingly. Rather than performing live each week, I have instead been recording organ repertoire and posting it on the St. Thomas website (https://www.stthomas.on.ca/) on a weekly basis. To date, I’ve worked through Brahms’s complete chorale preludes, and will be recording Bach’s Neumeister Chorale Preludes over the next few weeks. This preparation of material also helps me maintain technique, so that when the rescheduled concerts arrive, I am ready to perform at a high level.

As for how best people reading this can stay in touch, there are two places: the first is St. Thomas’s website (https://www.stthomas.on.ca/), where recordings and updates are posted regularly; and my own personal website (https://www.orguenouveau.com/), where a listing of recitals and concerts, as well as recordings, provides an outline of what I’m up to on a regular basis.

Music is my compass. I am a freelance musician, educator and community artist. I would be scared to see how long this response would take if I was speaking for anyone else but myself (although, currently, I am at the helm of a wonderful thing called the Hornepayne Community Arts Project, and can’t pass up on the opportunity of  wishing the brave music and theatre graduates from Mohawk and Centennial Colleges respectively huge congratulations and my support as they enter our community at this crazy time!) 

When COVID-19 hit, I watched most of my summer plans for performance, collaboration and travel crumble over the course of a week. A lot of festivals and venues are cancelling or suspending activities all the way through till September. 

As someone with a part-time contract at a post-secondary program, I was lucky to have a bit of an extra cushion. It has given me a (small) bit of breathing room to figure things out – but I am sending love and solidarity to my colleagues who, like me, are seeing a cancellation of the work that sustains them through the four otherwise lean months while we wait to find out if enrollment will allow our rehiring in the fall. The added uncertainty of what will happen next school year means that ultimately the thing I have had to let go of is any small bit of certainty I have found in my career as an artist.

Of all the things I will want to pick up on once circumstances allow, one stands out.  Last year, I was lucky enough to receive an Ontario Arts Council grant for a collaborative community arts project in the amazing township of Hornepayne, in Northern Ontario. Our last community visit has been indefinitely suspended, and the summer arts employment strategy that we were working on is in suspended animation while we wait to see how granting bodies will respond, or whether we’ll be given the opportunity to re-imagine our project to respond to whatever restrictions are likely to be in place through the summer.

But! I have a whole bunch of incredible community partners up north and down here, and some of them are brilliantly and bravely reframing their work and pushing forward. It looks like students from southern and northern Ontario will come together for an online presentation as part of some kind of collective “Music Monday” celebration – even if we have to pick a Monday in June instead of the early May official day we had been working towards. It’s nice to know that the collective will is to still celebrate what we’ve done. We’ve set our new goal as “The First Monday that we can all be together in the same place!”

Meanwhile, it’s a bit like like safely navigating a long curve on a motorcycle – you have to look at where you want to end up.

As an artist and musician, I’m giving myself time to incubate ideas, to create music for myself now that the college semester is over, and like anybody else, giving myself permission to feel whatever comes up during this strange time. Maybe by the time this is all over, I’ll have created something new that I feel like sharing.

In my work as an educator and arts facilitator, I am trying to make frameworks for things, rather than concrete plans, so that I can stay as adaptable as I can to a situation that seems to be changing every minute. 

For people reading this  who want to stay in touch with what I am doing and planning,  I took myself off social media a while back, and my website is about as interesting as I am in maintaining it (which is to say, not so much right now).  However, at the moment, I am the human engine behind the social media for the Hornepayne Community Arts Project on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or at hornepaynecommunityarts@gmail.com so you can, as often as not, find me there.

As for where to pin myself on the map, this is hard. Mostly, I’m in COVID land! One pin belongs in Hamilton Ontario – I am providing the postal code for Mohawk College rather than my home address. . But another pin definitely belongs in Hornepayne, Ontario. (And there’s another heart-shaped pin that belongs at M5T 2N4 in Toronto. But that’s another story!

I am music director of the Canadian Opera Company. 

Since COVID-19 hit, as all performing artists I have had to let go the possibility of performing live. I miss this irreplaceable experience. I miss the magic when the lights go down and the curtain rises. I miss the symbiotical flow of energy between us performers and our audiences, and yes I even miss the stress of preparation before.

Let's hope sometime soon we will be able to open the doors to our performance venues again - to enjoy together the magic of sound embracing and surrounding us, evoking our deep emotions. In the meanwhile, I study scores, play the piano, clean up the kitchen - in no particular order.

People wanting  to stay in touch with me can do so via Twitter @johannesdebus. You'll also want to keep checking the COC's various social platforms (@canadianopera on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram). They've been showcasing a series of past COC productions and newly-taped at-home performances under the hashtag #OperaAtHome, but soon you'll be seeing many new digital offerings and interactive opportunities, some of which I will be filming with the team. You'll have to stay tuned to see more!