© 2024 WMRA and WEMC
WMRA : More News, Less Noise WEMC: The Valley's Home for Classical Music
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Music Feeds Us

What’s for dinner?  Most of us look in the fridge, the freezer, and go from there.  But for many in our area, deciding what to eat is a daily struggle.   Violist Fitz Gary is among those using music to help, as Kimberlea Daggy reports.

FITZ GARY:  It’s an issue that’s often swept under the rug.  I think we think about hunger being a problem in other countries and not so much our country.  The number of how many people don’t know where there next meal is coming from is sort of shocking to us that’s happening in our area.  The Blue Ridge Area Food Bank serves over 120,000 people every month.

Charlottesville native and violist Fitz Gary has performed all over the world.  But for the last five years, he’s used music as a platform to raise hunger awareness.  That idea began back in 2009 with another community-minded violist, Carol Roland, who teaches at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.  After she created a concert series to support the hungry, other communities latched onto the idea, and now professional and student musicians all over the country are playing concerts to benefit the hungry, as Fitz Gary explains.

GARY:  To date we’ve raised 82,000 meals for the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank and we’d love to bring that number to over 100,000.  At the main benefit concerts, patrons are asked to bring either a canned food or monetary contribution to the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank.  That’s really our main goal, is providing the audience with lovely chamber music and inspire people to donate to the local food bank and hopefully make a difference in solving this problem.

Music Feeds Us presents two concerts this weekend.  Here are the details.

Kimberlea Daggy has spent three decades as a public radio announcer/producer. She currently hosts All Things Considered on WMRA, the NPR news station for Charlottesville and the Shenandoah Valley. Kimberlea also hosts and produces two programs on WEMC, Harrisonburg’s all-classical station: Airplay, highlighting classical musicians and ensembles in and around Central Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley, and Sing It!, a program of mostly contemplative, mostly unaccompanied choral music. Prior to moving to the Shenandoah Valley in 2015, Kimberlea worked for a variety of public radio stations around the country, including both KUSC and the Classical Public Radio Network in Los Angeles, WFDD in Winston-Salem, NC and WILL in Urbana, IL. She has created and presented a wide array of programs on classical music stations in the United States. Kimberlea has co-hosted live broadcasts of Los Angeles Opera performances, providing commentary and interviewing international artists such as Marilyn Horne, Denyce Graves and William Friedkin. She has given pre-performance talks and emceed programs for a variety of organizations, including LA Opera, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Ojai Music Festival and the American Guild of Organists.