East Musicians on Call

Instagram: @east_musiciansoncall

East Musicians on call is a widely expanding club that was introduced at the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year, right in the midst of the growing Covid-19 pandemic. President and founder of the club, Christopher Shin (‘23), is looking to enrich all students, no matter what age, in the education of music.

“Our goal is to provide an open platform for East students to influence and benefit the local communities by sharing our talents and love of music,” says Shin.

The club has two main goals including sending out music projects in close collaborations with community and tutoring elementary and middle school students.

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Shin says they are forced to stick with their virtual climate, but he looks forward to when students can go back to school and start the mini-concerts he had originally planned for.

Additionally, technology is of course, always complicated, but syncing multiple performances together to create one spectacular performance is extremely difficult. To keep everything organized, there are link trees and google forms, where there is always a position available for technology managers with each upcoming project.

The club is a sign-up based program and it is open to everyone. When sending out google forms and sign-up geniuses for each coming project, there is no minimum requirement for how many members can be involved. Members have the opportunity to sign up for an art (advertising) or technology role, a role to be an instrumental or vocal performer, a project manager and they also send out forms for music tutoring.

As far as the music tutoring goes, they have already had a tutoring session with the Rosa International Middle School vocal department. About 20 Rosa students showed up, and about 25 East students showed up to tutor. The East students would listen to the Rosa performers sing and give advice to the aspiring vocalists. In addition, it was also an opportunity to chat within the community which is tremendously important during this nerve-wracking time.

For those who sign up to be performers, the board gives the performers two to three weeks to practice their production before it goes to the technology managers. The entire process takes about one month to complete and release.

The board comes up with a theme, sends out the sign-ups, gives performers an opportunity to practice, and then gives some time to the technology producers to combine the vocal performances with the instrumental performances. The club then goes live on YouTube and premieres their performances on Sunday evenings.

In the future, the club hopes to get more involved with the local community and perform in person after schools are opened.

Anyone can get involved in the club whether it be through music, or another area such as advertising or technology. Although East Musicians on call has just been introduced this year, it already hosts an impressive amount of musical talent.