A Winnipeg high school student has found a way to stay musically active and connect with fellow artists around the world, despite the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Clarinetist Kara Hackford, a Grade 12 student at Sturgeon Heights Collegiate, told 680 CJOB her ambitious “Karanet’s Army” project stemmed from a desire to keep up the momentum she had going as an aspiring classical musician in 2019.
“I was winning auditions, and I was on the radio another time, and I thought I lost all of that totally,” she said, “so I wanted to create an opportunity that could help musicians everywhere.”
That opportunity, Karanet’s Army, is an ever-growing and ever-evolving group of young musicians from around the world — including Canada, France, Mexico, and beyond — who team up to tackle classical masterpieces from the comfort of their own homes.
Hackford said she had a social media account focused on sharing memes that had amassed a whopping 15,000 followers, so she reached out to that audience to find her musical collaborators.
“I put out a call for them, compiled them all into this group chat and I said, ‘we can all still make music together even though we’re in countries dispersed around the world but we would need someone to help edit’… and we had two people step forward.
“We started off small — people weren’t exactly sure if this was a serious project or not.
“The first project we had done was Beethoven’s 5th symphony, and we only had 14 musicians. People watched that and said, OK, this is a serious thing.”
The ‘army’ then expanded to 30 by the second video, Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony Third Movement, and then around 40 players for a performance of Danzon No. 2, released Monday.
Despite her obvious musical abilities, Hackford said she was never a child prodigy — in fact, she had music teachers in elementary school suggest music may not be the best career path for her.
She said she plans to carry on the Karanet’s Army project throughout university, where she hopes to study music in the fall of 2021.
Hackford’s project is one of many ways local musicians are finding ways to keep active during the pandemic, as opportunities — especially for classical music — have been few and far between over the past few months.
Soprano vocalist, violinist and violist Zohreh Gervais took matters into her own hands this summer with the Red Haus Live series of front porch concerts — a series highlighting classical, jazz and folk musicians that recently wrapped up its first year as an overwhelming success.
Gervais told 680 CJOB earlier in the pandemic that her DIY series of house concerts came about due to a dearth of opportunities to perform at all, due to restrictions on traditional venues.
“The first one, we had people in tears, because we haven’t been able to make music together, and if we have, it’s just been ourselves. So being able to perform and to do so for an audience again, it feels incredibly good,” she said.
“This is what musicians do — they want to perform and they want to have a way to communicate something that’s important to them.”
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