If you have ever wanted to perform music live onstage in front of an audience, now’s your chance! As long as your definition of “onstage” is flexible.
Make Music Orange County is a Central Florida project that aims to blanket the whole county in music performed by the community that’s free to the community.
This is only the second year of Make Music Orange County, but the event itself is part of a decades-old worldwide holiday called Make Music Day or World Music Day. The June 21st holiday started in Paris in the 1980s with residents being urged to play music outside in their neighborhoods or in public spaces and parks. It spread to New York, Miami and more than 700 cities across the world.
Vicki Landon is the Administrator of Orange County Arts and Cultural Affairs. She said during Make Music Orange County, the musical possibilities are endless.
“We can have a barbershop quartet in a coffeeshop, we can have a guitarist in someone’s side yard of a private house, we can have Asian fusion being performed in a grocery store...the intent is just to cover every square mile of Central Florida [with music],” said Landon.
She explained how community members can get involved.
Take the stage or make the stage
First, Landon said, choose your role. “You can host and be a venue, or if you are a performer, you can sign up to perform.” The event website, makemusicday.org/orangecounty, serves as a matchmaker of sorts between potential performers and potential venues.
The word “venue” is a loose term in this case. “You're opening up your home, or your porch, or your shop, or your cafe, or your side yard to a performer,” she said. “We've had venues that are just a space on a sidewalk all the way up to venues that are community centers at Orange County, so there's going to be a wide variance there.”
If you’re a performer, you describe your music, your style, your ensemble size, and whether you need electricity for [an] amplifier,” explained Landon. The site matches up venues and performers, and “once both people swipe right, that performance gets auto populated in a schedule and a map of performances for the day.”
'Community is hungry' for more art
Landon learned something important in the first year of Make Music Orange County. “Our community is hungry for something like this,” she said. “In our inaugural year, I would have been thrilled if we had two or four performances in one or two locations, because it was our first year trying it, trying to get someone to latch on to the idea of a new holiday that's foreign to them, it can be an uphill lift.”
Instead, Landon said, there were 40 different performances across more than a dozen locations throughout Orange County. “This community wants more of this, and I'm really excited to see it grow.”
