In these unprecedented times, many people have turned to music to help them through the crisis. More so than now, there is a greater need to bring music to the community, to enable people to enjoy and learn from making music with each other to enrich their lives despite the pandemic. How can we still continue to reach out to the community to create, improvise and make music together in spite of not being able to interact in real time?

In this presentation, we will explore how two musicians living in Singapore and Austria were able to collaborate remotely by specially curating three online music workshops for 8 children homes in Myanmar as part of the collaboration between Music Society of Myanmar and Global Village for Hope’s music outreach programme. In these music workshops, the themes focused on were creativity and exploration of sounds. The children were encouraged to develop their imaginations and experienced making music together with their peers using everyday items, or even their own body (voice and body percussion). Though far apart in reality, and facing some challenges in this online setting, both the musicians and the children were still able to connect through active collaborations of music making. We will further discuss how these workshops positively impacted the lives of the children and how they can be further developed and used as a model for future online community music making workshops.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dqfVzqV9QL7emzbP8jli4to47XIg8pM1