Musician Relief Fund looks to help those without a gig
The closures caused by the coronavirus have been hard for everyone — restaurants, salons, teachers and more.
Erica von Kleist wants you know musicians are in that group as well.
von Kleist — a saxophonist, flautist, teacher and entrepreneur based in Whitefish and New York — started the GoFundMe page for the Montana Music Relief Fund, which hopes to raise $5,000 to go local musicians put out of work by the virus.
So far the page has raised $3,500. The fund is open to anyone who makes 51% or more of their income from music or music-related fields, like teaching or production.
She knows the situation well, von Kleist said, since she’s experiencing it herself.
“I’m a full-time musician and I saw this situation coming for musicians. Obviously bars and restaurants are closed, that’s a huge majority of where a lot of local Montana musicians make their money. From there it goes up to concert halls and venues. I’ve personally lost thousands of dollars of work with things getting canceled,” she said. “I wanted to create something that would be some sort of financial help for the local music economy.”
Music and the arts especially need help, she added, because they’re generally the one of the most underfunded and first to go.
“Musicians are the last to get hired and the first to get fired. Habitually in our society, the arts are the last thing to get funded, you can see with the way schools struggle with funding for the arts or how concert halls struggle with their endowments. The minute there needs to be something cut, music is the first thing to be cut,” von Kleist said. “With bars and restaurants, that’s the case too. Being that we’re dealing with a staggered opening, the music thing might not come back. A lot of these places are going to be hurting and they’re not going to have the income to pay these bands to come back right away.”
von Kleist added that for those struggling during quarantine or social distancing, the arts can be a haven.
“During this pandemic, people are turning to the arts for relief and a diversion and for good vibes, all the reasons we turn to the arts. We just don’t think about how the people who create this stuff need to make a living too,” she said.
While the fund is inching toward its goal since starting on March 19, von Kleist said she’s hoping for more donations moving forward.
She likens it to a cover charge at the Great Northern, and said if enough people gave just that much, they’d be fully funded.
“The response has been OK,” she said. “Obviously everyone who’s donated I’m super grateful for. The response could be better. There’s other GoFundMes for other things in the community that we need, but this is definitely the most underfunded. I’m hoping people would even be willing to donate their $5 cover charge at the Northern. If 1,000 people did that we’d make our goal.”
The fund’s page is available at www.gofundme.com/f/montana-music-relief-fund. For those musicians looking to apply for funding, email montanamusicfund@gmail.com.