On this first day of spring at a most unusual time in our history I am making a unusual Friday post to the weekly blog. Followers and newcomers alike will want to know about some significant changes here at Ideas About Music in response to changing circumstances around the COVID-19 outbreak. I would first send out wishes to all readers and followers for health, safety and spiritual strength: we are all in need of these.

1. With the suspension of public gatherings three choirs under my direction, the Georgetown Choral Society, the Marion Singers of Greater Toronto and the Choir of Rosedale Presbyterian Church are unable to meet, and either have already or will likely be cancelling performances / service offerings. I have reached into an old skill set and hauled out old equipment to create Choral View Radio, a tool intended to help choirs keep connected to the music we are working on, and to one another in the absence of meeting. I am producing a weekly 30-minute “radio show” format episode for each choir, all hosted right here at www.ideasaboutmusic.ca/choral-view-radio.
   
2. The suspension of Sunday Services at Rosedale Presbyterian Church, as a particular case of this, has generated a response from us on the staff to create a weekly Virtual Service Bulletin, a regular multi-media transmission of information (and we hope inspiration) intended to replace BOTH our usual print Bulletin, and the Sunday Service itself. My contribution to this has been to convert the Choral View Radio episode I might otherwise have created for the RPC Choir into a weekly curated episode that seeks to fold into 30 minutes two hymns, two anthems, an organ voluntary and in the form of spoken commentary, my Music Notes, as you might otherwise have read them here at ideasaboutmusic.ca.
   
3. With RPC’s Sunday Music Notes now having temporarily moved in spoken form to the RPC CVR episode, depending on my available time I will be taking the opportunity to think and write about musical topics outside of the church context, so you can continue to expect weekly submissions of some sort. I would encourage you, if interested to look into the three weekly CVR episodes as well – as you know or might guess about them, where I’m concerned if there’s music, the ideas flow fairly quickly around them!

The cover graphic/music for this post is Kaikki Maat, Te Riemuitkatte (‘All Nations, you must Reimagine’) by Finnish a capella supergroup Rajaton, whose name in their native language means boundless. It serves as the theme music for the three weekly episodes of Choral View Radio, but its character and the sentiments expressed by both the song itself and the band’s name are I think valuable to this moment in human history.

As I say at the close of each CVR episode, see you next week, stay safe, keep in touch with one another, look after one another and the people around you, and most of all, Enjoy the View.

-CD