School bands, choirs and musical groups in School District 27 will be coming together on Monday, May 5 to celebrate Music Monday.
Lake City Secondary School band teacher Laura Eilers says the event takes place at 10 a.m., May 5 in Rink 1 at the Cariboo Memorial Complex and people from the community are invited to participate with the school students or just come out and watch.
“Anyone from the community wanting to participate in this event is more than welcome to join in, or to sit and watch, as more than 300 musicians from School District 27 play and sing together,” Eilers says.
The highlight of Music Monday this year will be the singing and playing of Is Somebody Singing, a song co-written for Music Monday by astronaut Chris Hadfield and Ed Robinson from the Barenaked Ladies.
“Any group or any one who plays an instrument or who sings, will sing the same song at the same time from coast to coast.”
This is the second year School District 27 has hosted a Music Monday event.
School participants will include music groups from Lake City Secondary School, many elementary school choirs, Peter Skene Ogden, and elementary bands/choirs from 100 Mile elementary schools, along with various musicians from across the Cariboo, Eilers says.
Participants will start off singing and playing the Music Monday song, then each of the groups will perform one or two pieces each.
“It is a great event to promote music education and the students last year had a lot of fun!” Eilers says.
Music Monday is an event to promote the importance of music education.
“Every two years a new song is written by a Canadian artist, and is then transcribed into a plethora of arrangements for different groups, such as band, choir, steel drums and recorders,” Eilers says.
She says 2014 marks the 10th anniversary of the Coalition for Music Education’s Music Monday project, an event which gets bigger and bigger every year, with students of all ages participating across the country.
The song, lyrics and arrangements can be found on the website musicmonday.ca.
“The event takes place the first Monday in May every year and has become a day that many students across the country look forward to,” Eilers says.