If you were able to attend the Rockbridge Youth Chorale’s concert last month, you know that our artistic directors, assistants and interns are building some really good musicians. Part of the mission of the Rockbridge

Choral Society is to promote and bring choral music to the young people in our community and thereby produce lifelong singers, musicians, and music lovers. For the 2021/2022 season, our principal youth artistic director, Lacey Lynch, has proposed a new program for pre-kindergarten/kindergarten students which will better prepare them for the RYC Children’s Choir.

   Singing will be the main focus of the class, which will be held in conjunction with usual Tuesday night rehearsals beginning in the fall of 2021. Participants will broadly explore and experience music through movement, creative play and beginning musicianship – rhythm, pitch matching, dynamics, tempo, etc. This program will prepare the youngest singers for our Children’s and Youth Choirs and will largely pay for itself through tuition. Katelyn Roll, currently the assistant choral director, will be the principal instructor.

   The RCS Board of Directors approved the program at its May meeting. For more information on this program, please email Lacey Lynch RYCLexington@gmail.com. We look forward to more great things from our youngest singers!

   We’ve been cooped up and unable to travel for over a year. How about an artsy excursion in the fall? Here are a couple of options for your traveling pleasure.

   Musician, song writer, cultural icon, and Nobel laureate Bob Dylan opens his first US art exhibit, Retrospectrum, on November 30, 2021 at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University. Dylan’s decades of art works will be represented by 120 paintings, drawings and sculptures. The exhibit runs through April 17, 2022. Busy guy!

   Broadway’s yearlong Covid shutdown is nearing an end. New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo will allow three of Broadway’s longest-running shows to reopen on September 14 – “The Lion King”, “Hamilton”, and “Wicked”.  Cast members released a statement signaling that Broadway is committed to ending a devastating period of hardship for the tens of thousands who make their living directly on Broadway shows and the tens of thousands who work in Broadway-dependent industries.

   From Georgia to New York, Brood X cicadas (Brood 10 periodic cicadas) will be emerging from the earth near you this summer and making their own music. Seventeen years is a long time to wait. This group went to bed in 2004 when George W. Bush was president and 2021 is the year of their emergence up and down the eastern portions of the US affecting the District of Columbia and areas in 15 states. These loud bugs emerge when soil temperature consistently reaches 64 degrees and often after a rain. About 5 days after they emerge, to attract females, the males start to “sing” by contracting rigid membranes on their almost hollow abdomens to make that characteristic noise that can reach 90 to 100 decibels – as loud as a lawn mower. The 2021 cicada crop is anticipated to be one of the largest and most broadly distributed groups of periodical cicadas. Scientists predict as many as 200 cicadas per square yard in some areas. In contrast, the more common summer cicadas occur at a density of 2 per square yard. So, get ready. Here’s a map of states where Brood X is expected to emerge. We’ll spare you the noise. You won’t miss it coming soon to a yard near you.

Miles Davis 5/26/1926