Lydia Bennett ’21 on vocals and Ava Mastroianni ’21 performing from the top of Paradise Hill in Bethel for this year’s Yulefest Concert.
The Gould community wasn’t able to gather together this year for the traditional holiday Yulefest concert, so music teachers Heidi Modr and Mesa Schubeck decided to open things up and get creative. Why try to recreate something exactly how it was before the pandemic when we can use technology to make something entirely new?
Ms. Modr threw it out to the students. She opened it up to anyone who wanted to contribute, they just needed to produce and submit their own video, and Gould would add it to the program. The chorus and band put together a few numbers, but students came through and filled out the program. Heidi and Mesa treated us to their own special performance as well, see if you can find it in the video below! On December 9, during advisory time, the entire school gathered remotely over Zoom to watch the show.
There are solo performances on guitar, small ensembles, and Brady Bunch-style vocal and instrumental pieces, but two students went way above and beyond with their submission. Ava Mastroianni ’21 and Lydia Bennett ’21 created a music video for their performance of The Space Between by Dove Cameron from the Disney movie The Descendants 2. Their video highlights iconic locations in Bethel. Ava is a gifted and computer savvy musician and put together the audio track herself while Lydia added the video editing expertise. Both students added vocals to the project. Ava describes below how it came to be in her own words.
A scene from “The Space Between” on Artist’s Bridge in Newry.
From Ava:
“Lydia and I have been performing together since 7th grade, and we always envisioned an awesome duet together for Yulefest our senior year, but, due to Covid (which we originally saw as an obstacle) our performances had to be virtual.
“We immediately thought to do a music video because we love acting and singing. We love theater, so some scenes of the music video feature different locations and costumes. The song we chose to cover, Space Between by Dove Cameron, was just a song that we both liked and was a duet. It actually wasn’t until Lydia’s dad pointed out how appropriate it is for today’s situation that we realized the deeper meaning.
Lydia is an amazing planner and is full of ideas, so she came up with the costumes, locations, and how and where to film. She also edited all of the video clips together. Being super passionate about music production, I put all of the audio together using Logic Pro to try and match all of the instruments and make it sound like the original while making it our own. Throughout the process, I learned how fun it was to be creative in times when we feel like so much has to be uniform. There’s always an outlet for creativity, you just have to look for ways to find it!”
Check out Ava & Lydia’s full music video below!
And watch the Yulefest Student Concert in its entirety!
For more music from Ava, check her out on Spotify & Soundcloud. One day you’ll be able to coolly remark, “I prefer her earlier stuff.”
Want to edit cool videos and create amazing musical performances?
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