Make Music New York Announces Highlights

Make Music New York, the unique, live, free citywide musical celebration held each June 21, has announced its updated schedule of exciting and diverse in-person concerts, performances, music lessons, jam sessions and other music making events. The daylong musical festival on the summer solstice is the flagship event of Make Music Day, which is being staged in over 100 U.S. cities and the entire states of Connecticut, Hawaii, Utah, Vermont and Wisconsin. Make Music New York will further demonstrate music's power to unite, heal and uplift. MMNY 2021 is returning to a mostly in-person event after 2020 moved to a largely virtual format due to COVID. Safety protocols will remain in place.

Make Music New York is open to anyone who wants to take part. Now in its 15th year, Make Music New York encourages music makers of all ages, backgrounds and skill levels to take center stage and share their skills and passions through performances from public plazas and open streets, parks and community gardens, on sidewalks fronting public libraries and small businesses, and in partnerships with fellow arts presenters and cultural institutions across all five boroughs.

First launched in France in 1982 as Fête de la Musique, Make Music Day is observed by hundreds of millions of people today in over 1,000 cities across 120 countries. Promoting the natural music maker in all of us, the celebration is an open invitation for everyone to make, share, teach, learn and explore music on the longest day of the year and the first day of summer. Make Music Day is presented in the U.S. by The NAMM Foundation and coordinated by the nonprofit Make Music Alliance.

New York will join Make Music Day cities around the world in memorializing all the lives lost to COVID, by participating in This Moment in Time, a series of percussion performances played on gongs from public places globally. For one interrupted hour, beginning at 12 pm on June 21, Ryan Sawyer and the percussion ensemble Talujon will perform new works on multiple arrays of gongs set up at the Seaport District in Lower Manhattan to mark the losses of the past year. Afterwards, the public will be invited to play the gongs themselves.

Make Music New York will also feature several Mass Appeal concerts, which bring together people of all ages and skill levels to make music in participatory, single-instrument groups, including accordions, classical guitars, French horns, harmonicas, mandolins, ukuleles and violins.

All Make Music New York events are free and open to the public. Participants who wish to perform may register at www.makemusicny.org. A full schedule of events is posted at makemusicny.org.