Kiwanis cancels 70th annual festival, while music events still on hold due to COVID-19

What was meant to be a milestone musical event in February 2021 has been cancelled, as uncertainty looms for the Kiwanis Music Festival and other music festivities amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Current regulations in Newfoundland and Labrador advise against choral and group musical settings, leading the Department of Education to postpone choir and band practices and performances due to a higher level of risk of exposure to the virus.

Incoming Kiwanis president Margaret Wakeham says February may seem like a long way away, but for an event that requires multiple venues, volunteers, fundraising and participants, it's not a lot of time to leave things up in the air; that's why the festival decided to cancel its 2021 plans altogether.

"Typically, we would have adjudicators already hired, but we delayed that because we were seriously looking at, how confident are we that we can pull off a festival the way we know a festival in February, given the continued uncertainty around COVID-19?" Wakeham told CBC's St. John's Morning Show.

With more than 2,000 entries in the festival — more than half of them singers, as well as choral groups — and concerns about sanitizing surfaces like pianos in between performances, not to mention physical distancing requirements, Wakeham said the Kiwanis Music Festival organizers felt cancelling would be the safest option.

COVID-19 has changed a lot of things, just from an operational perspective.- Margaret Wakeham

"Rather than delay making a decision and have people not know what direction we were going in, we decided at our annual general meeting to, for this year, cancel the festival."

Wakeham said while there is still the possibility that some Kiwanis-affiliated virtual events could take place, there were too many unknowns that could have prevented some artists from participating.

"Our festival involves so many variables that we thought if we slice off a piece of it, then we deny part of the festival to some other participants — and we wanted our 70th festival to be a big deal," she said.

"We're gonna take this as an opportunity to review how we do things, and while we've cancelled the February 2021 festival if conditions continue to improve we may try and have something in the spring, but that's a big maybe right now."

The lost year is a hard hit for the festival, Wakeham said, as well as musicians across the province who are essentially losing a year of musical education and performances.

"I'm very concerned about that … but COVID-19 has changed a lot of things, just from an operational perspective," Wakeham said.

"For the 12 days that the music festival is on, we have eight different venues that we have in play, there are over 130 sessions — and that means morning, afternoon and evening — and within any one of those sessions we might have three or four different classes of students, so students on the inside, the participants on the inside, and there are families and participants on the outside huddled sometimes in a porch in a church."

Meanwhile, music educators are calling for the provincial government to reconsider its recommendations around band and choir to enable specialists to come up with a creative solution to continue musical education.

Postponing all band and choir activities for a year "denies students fundamental experiences in their learning and development," said Ian Sutherland, dean of the school of music at Memorial University, in a statement released Thursday.

"Music is core to the culture of Newfoundland and Labrador. Musical learning and development are foundational in our system of education," he said.

"Moreover, music develops creativity, expression, teamwork, leadership, communication, self-confidence, and so much more. For students, music ensembles are fundamental to their social lives, their well-being, and their self-identities."

Sutherland added that the pandemic and necessary quarantine, if anything, highlighted the need for music and the arts to improve people's quality of life.

"In the strongest possible terms, we join our voices to the chorus calling on the government of Newfoundland and Labrador to work with music teachers through consultation, dialogue, and collaboration, so that they may have the opportunity to continue to provide these valuable learning opportunities to our students," Sutherland added.

N.L. taking 'precautionary approach'

The recommendations as they stand for Newfoundland and Labrador are based on current available information, Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Janice Fitzgerald said during Wednesday's weekly COVID-19 media briefing.

"The evidence that we have is based on our experience to date and we have seen significant spread in situations where there has been singing involved, so in church services, in karaoke bars, in situations where there has been singing," she said.

"We know that people, when they're singing, they're able to spread the aerosols or droplets from their breathing much further than if they're not singing. This is all really new information, though, and so we are learning as time goes on, there's not a lot of research being done on it."

Fitzgerald added it is a "precautionary approach," and while other jurisdictions might not be implementing the same strategy, her department is suggesting what it believes is best for Newfoundland and Labrador.

The science of COVID-19 is still evolving, Fitzgerald said, and if the department receives new information that it can be accommodated without increasing the risk of infection, they will revisit the issue.

"I know that right now we're in the process of getting some information on just that topic. So we are examining it, we're looking at it closely and … we're going by the best evidence that we have at the moment," she said.

"But as we've said with this disease from the beginning: if that evidence changes … we'll change our recommendations, too."

Read more from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador