Our waiting room, normally bustling with parents, students and their siblings, is pin-drop silent these days. Our lesson rooms are empty and noiseless. But we don’t want you to get the wrong idea. There is still plenty of activity going on at the Joy of Music School! The School is 100 percent virtual for the fall semester, following our virtual-only end to the spring semester.

We have about 160 students enrolled and they’re getting their weekly lessons online, via the Zoom app, from roughly 80 instructors. These include individual lessons and group classes such as choir, baritone ukulele, introduction to music and multimedia production. Still to come: our regular outreach program. A number of schools and after-school sites where we’ve done outreach in the past have requested virtual music lessons this semester, and we’ll be supplying those, says Julie Carter, our Director of Music Education. “We’re putting lessons on our website and they’ll be able to access them. We’ll provide support materials, like worksheets or instrument demonstrations.” This extra flurry of activity has been made more affordable with help from the Arts Fund of the East Tennessee Foundation who has provided Covid-19 response funding.

The public school shutdowns last spring took everyone by surprise, and it took some scrambling to get our students and instructors connected online. But we did it— and Julie is optimistic the fall semester will run even more smoothly. This is partly because we’ve all become more accustomed to communicating via Zoom and other online video apps. “The kids are all so used to screen time that it was an easy adjustment for most of them,” she says. “It was a challenge for some of our teachers. But most of our teachers — the vast majority — are gung ho and willing to make it work, and I’m so grateful for that,” she says.