The Trinidad and Tobago Music Festival Association is moving into unfamiliar territory by hosting its biennial festival virtually, for the first time in its 70-year-plus existence.

Although this shift was necessitated by the covid19 pandemic, the festival’s executive sees positivity in it and future festivals will be a hybrid experience, blending the virtual and physical.

Its chairman Jessel Murray and business officer Maureen Clement spoke to Newsday about the upcoming 34th virtual festival, whose preliminary round starts in February. Registration is ongoing and will end on January 31.

This year’s festival will run from February 1 and will end on April 29 with the championships, which start on April 25.

Clement said on February 1 entrants can begin submitting videos until March 15. The preliminary adjudication starts early in March.

She added that most of the pieces people are performing are their own choice and not test pieces. In the junior categories only certain classes will have test pieces. Clement said people will have to upload their own choice music before and a panel will vet them.

The 33rd edition of the festival was closed off prematurely because of the pandemic, Murray said.

The festival’s board then decided to observe what was happening in the local and global entertainment sectors and to be guided by government policy on how it should host its 34th edition.

Murray said it then held two stakeholder sessions with its members. He said this had never been done, but the pandemic provided the opportunity to do so – and the board presented to its members what it felt would happen.

“At that time we were hoping for a hybrid festival, which would have ended with our vaunted championships…where the best of the best get to compete. It would have then been face-to-face, but, of course, one of the things of dealing with covid19 is that you have to make decisions well into the future.”

[caption id="attachment_935556" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Jessel Murray, chairman of the Trinidad and Tobago Music Festival Association. -[/caption]

Murray said when the board saw the trends – even before the arrival of the omicron variant – the 2022 festival had to be virtual.

“Out of that we had to make the decisions that come out of it. Like: what sort of classes would we offer? How would we do our types of competitions? So we took the decision, we had to encourage no (in-person) participation.

"At first we started off with, we were going to have solos, duets, trios and quartets. Then we said, ‘No. All of the classes are going to be solo classes.’”

Its usual choral and instrumental competitions were removed from this year’s festival. So in both its junior and open categories, events will only be for soloists.

There are going to be preliminaries and finals with all-local adjudicators, who will judge videos sent to them.

For the championships, there will be “a sort of live experience” of the best of the best, and these would be adjudicated by one locally-based professional and one internation