Musicians from the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, University of Arizona and the Santa Cruz Foundation for the Performing Arts participated in “If Music Be the Food.”

 Courtesy If Music Be Food

This time last year, a group of musicians from the University of Arizona and Tucson Symphony Orchestra gathered at Grace St. Paul’s Episcopal Church to perform a benefit concert for Interfaith Community Services. It sold out.

When it came time to do this year’s fifth annual “If Music Be the Food” concert, all of the musicians were in lockdown, courtesy the coronavirus pandemic.

So they did what many musicians have been doing in this era of COVID-19: They turned to technology.

The musicians participating from the TSO, University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music, and the Santa Cruz Foundation for the Performing Arts met in Zoom sessions in April to discuss the program and their roles, then recorded their parts individually.

Then it fell on the concert’s coordinator, TSO violist and “If Music Be the Food” Tucson artistic director Candice Amato, to put it all together.

“I learned more about mixing and equalizing in the past month than I ever knew,” Amato said last week, days after she posted the concert on her group’s Facebook page and the Interfaith Community Services website.

This was arguably the group’s most challenging endeavor, said Amato, who launched the Tucson chapter of “If Music Be the Food” soon after she arrived in Tucson in 2015, fresh from grad school at the Eastman School in Rochester, New York.

“As an artist, our way of communicating with people is with music, with our art,” Amato said. “That’s what we do. It’s a different job when you’re not playing for an audience.”

The all-volunteer movement, founded by Eastman viola professor Carol Rodland in 2009, has more than a dozen chapters nationwide, but Amato said many of them bowed out of doing a concert this year because of the pandemic.

And while the notion of skipping the event this year might have crossed her mind, she and her colleagues were game for the challenge.

“This has been a really nice way to collaborate in a new way that we have never tried before,” Amato said.

And the need this year seems to be greater than the four previous years, she said.

“I think now you see a lot of people who are out of work and a lot of people who hadn’t had to rely on food banks before are finding themselves in a new state of need,” she said. “And food banks are also strained because people aren’t donating as much. I think the problem is at both ends.”

In its first four years, the Tucson event has raised about $5,000 cash and 1,200 pounds of food.

For the fifth annual concert, the musicians divided into four ensembles to perform works by Mozart, Béla Bartók and Irish violist and composer Garth Knox. The concert runs 20 minutes.

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Contact reporter Cathalena E. Burch at cburch@tucson.com or 573-4642. On Twitter @Starburch