MuseFest 2020: The Online Live Concert You Need To Know About!
What is the MuseFest all about?
MuseFest2020 is about opening the door to livestreaming for women and gender non-conforming artists, carving out a space in the new reality we are all living in right now. We were so excited to see how artists were going to livestreaming to adapt right now. It is amazing to see how resilient artists are, but we quickly wondered about access. Who was most likely to be comfortable livestreaming right away? Who has access to technology? As artists ourselves, we were craving some professional support for this brand new world.
We are the know the trend of early adopters vs. folks who might take a bit longer with any kind of change. And just like in the regular performance world, we think it is important to think about who we are seeing and who we are not seeing in music scenes. While we certainly couldn’t solve all the problems of access, we just wanted to do our part to ensure our community was also being given tools to take part in this new way of performing, so we quickly cobbled together a virtual festival.
We were extremely lucky in that Girls+ Rock Ottawa was open to partnering with us. Thanks to them, we were able to offer an awesome workshop on livestreaming hosted by local artist Kimberly Sunstrum. It was extremely informative - attendees walked away with a lot of technical and promotional knowledge and tools to do their livestreams.
Who started it?
MuseFest2020 is put on by Muse Collective, a community of women and gender non-conforming musicians and artists (women, femmes, trans, non-binary, two-spirit, and gender non-conforming folk) in Ottawa and beyond dedicated to supporting and creating opportunities for one another.
This is sort of a vision statement more than a mission right now - this is where we would like to be. While we had our first event back in 2017 - thanks to a micro-grant from the Ottawa Music Industry Coalition to honour Canadian women in the Juno Awards - we are still really just getting started. Right now, Chrissy Steinbock, and myself, Sarah Howard, are the ones putting things together. We are both musicians in the Ottawa scene, and we both wanted to find ways to connect women and non-binary musicians in the Ottawa scene. We really hope that through things like the festival we will grow to have more members and more folks volunteering to coordinate these types of initiatives for the community.
Who will be featured?
The line-up is PHENOMENAL. Overall we 18 performers, with a huge diversity among them. Today we had internationally renowned violin and viola player Ralitsa Tcholakova, who plays everything from classical to bossa nova and has been nominated for a Governor General’s Person Award. Later this week we will have Alexis Castrogiovanni, a classically trained cello-player based in Montréal who does incredibly haunting looping, and eels+elles, another Montréal-based classically trained alternative group. A huge group of our performers span across folk/country/jazz, including Clarissa Fortin, Merideth Brown, Oyster Boy, goodboy, Danielle Allard, Johnny Rouge, Birdie Whyte, Sissy (Chrissy Steinbock), and myself (Sarah Howard). On Saturday, we have a Juno-award winning artist - Brenda McIntyre - Medicine Song Woman - streaming all the way from BC! Another performance we are really looking forward to is by gloria guns on Saturday. Gloria is part of the Ottawa band Scary Bear Soundtrack, and her performance is called “Pandemic Fog,” a title I think all of us can relate to! Her performance is also part of National Drone Day - Ottawa - 2020 to celebrate drone music, and will combine lo-fi glitchy analog beat machines with traditional Korean instruments.
What are genres of music?
We’ve got classical, folk, blues, traditional Indigenous, traditional Korean, drone, jazz, country, celtic…it’s all here!
What can we expect from you in 2020?
With the way the world is right now it looks like more livestreaming! Our biggest regret in putting this together quickly is that we didn’t have time to apply for funding to pay artists. All the artists are playing for tips to their virtual tip jars, usually through PayPal or Ko-Fi. Right now we are working on finding some money to pay artists for future livestreaming performances, should we get the chance to do the again. We also have some neat workshop and collaborative recording/inter-arts ideas in the cooker, but of course it all depends on time and funding. Each Friday we also feature an artist from our community on our page. Be sure to follow us @musecollectiveottawa
SOCIALS
https://www.facebook.com/musecollectiveottawa/
https://www.instagram.com/musecollectiveottawa/
Sarah Howard: Sarah Howard is a co-founder of Muse Collective and a singer-songwriter now based in Kingston, Ontario. Painting folky mirages of landscapes, Sarah's work often explores the relations and imaginations we have with and of places. In 2018, she released her début EP, Niagara (Little Bullhorn Studios), where she explored her own bittersweet relationship with home, and how trauma maps onto landscape. Sarah completed a B. Mus in songwriting at Carleton University under the mentorship of Juno winner Lynn Miles and Canadian singer-songwriter Ian Tamblyn, earning the Carleton University Medal for Music. In 2019, Sarah completed a year-long retreat near Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and performed as a Via Rail Artist on Board. Her next project, Wanderlove, will be a full length album exploring life's transition and our everyday journeys into ourselves and the world.
Facebook/Instagram: @sarahhowardsongs
Chrissy Steinbock: Chrissy Steinbock is a co-founder of Muse Collective and a singer of sad songs best enjoyed while sipping whiskey and staring into the middle distance. Chrissy holds a Master of Arts in Music and Culture from Carleton University, and a Bachelor of Music in guitar performance. In addition to being a creator herself, Chrissy also collaborates on a number of projects, including the local black grass duo Wychwood.
Facebook: @sissy.songs, Instagram: @this.is.sissy
Facebook/Instagram: @musecollectiveottawa