Summer Music Week

As the weather improves and restrictions begin to lift in stages, we have also started to be able to plan ahead to this year’s end-of-year musical celebrations, our annual Summer Music Week festival.

Although it won’t necessarily be able to unfurl in the usual manner, we all feel that something need to take place – not only musically to mark the end of the academic year, but also to have something to which we can all look forward! We are currently planning a series of small-scale events to take place between Sunday 6 and Saturday 12 June, including a Big Band Sunday Swing event and two recitals by University Music Scholars; initial plans are now online here. www.kent.ac.uk/music/summermusic-week

Vinyl Countdown

Our live webshow, Vinyl Countdown, has continued to grow, and last month featured two special episodes featuring University staff; the first episode with Chris Deacy, Will Wollen, Harmonie Toros and Olly Double; and an all-staff special from the Marketing, Outreach, Recruitment and Admissions team.

As always, we continue to be hugely grateful for the support of all the music donors in so generously supporting all the (rather unusual) programme of activities this year, and the prospect of being able to perform a rather more modest than usual Summer Music Week is a real tonic for both all the students and staff involved in music-making, as well as to the various members of the Music team who have worked so hard to keep musicians at the University engaged. We can now look forward to what seemed, earlier in the year, to be a remote possibility – the opportunity to bring student and staff musicians at the University together in June for a somewhat different, but nevertheless very welcome, musical finale to the year.