Summer 2021 Lyre Opportunities

Dear LANA members and friends in North America,

Since our much-anticipated 2021 World Lyre Conference in the Czech Republic has been postponed until next year, LANA has stepped in to provide our members and friends in North America with another opportunity that we feel could bridge the gap this summer.

The LANA Board would like to encourage and support some in-person regional lyre gatherings this summer and into the fall. In our last Annual Report, we included a map that divided our membership into regions so that lyrists could be aware of the geographic locations of other lyre enthusiasts in their local areas. For your interest, we have included this map along with the link to a brief survey to kick off this process in order to provide us with information we can use in helping to support as many gatherings as possible. Of course, each person could choose to host or participate freely with whatever group anyone would like to gather or invite.

In the survey, we ask about your personal interest to participate in such a gathering and what parameters (location, dates, timing, etc.) would work best for you. We also ask if you might be willing to host such a gathering in your local area. Importantly, we ask if you imagine that a group in your area might wish to be joined by an experienced lyre teacher to guide or facilitate such a gathering. Finally, we ask for volunteers who might be willing to serve as such traveling teachers.

Your Lyre Association has made the decision to cover travel expenses of volunteer teachers up to $500 per teacher, if the local group is willing to host them and perhaps collect a modest gratuity for them. All details would be decided by the general consensus of the local participants with our support as needed.

So we are beginning this process by gathering information to see how LANA can best support our members and friends in this opportunity to start making music together again. Your responses to our questions will allow us to do this, and we hope that everyone who even has a remote possibility to participate in such a gathering will please respond to this brief survey. We have already heard from one international colleague that he will take this into consideration in planning a personal trip to the States this summer so that he might be able to participate in one of our regional events!

Over the last 14 months, we have all had to become very creative in seeking for soul-nourishing ways to support our music-making and lyre-playing in the absence of being able to gather as we normally would. This summer, the LANA Board would like to work with our members and friends to take advantage of new possibilities that exist for us now to move in the direction of playing together again in anticipation of our World Lyre Conference in 2022. Please help us to do this by taking a moment to respond to this survey so that we can support each other in these efforts!

Go to: https://fs3.formsite.com/lyrists/form7/index.html

Sincerely,
Sheila Johns, for LANA