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WVU program, choir director offers more than music during crisis

MORGANTOWN — Kym Scott is director of the WVU School of Music Choral Studies Program and director of the Community Music Program’s West Virginia Community Choir.

She has brought joy and comfort to northern West Virginia for over five years, with her choral concerts at the Canady Creative Arts Center of WVU and through outreach opportunities around the area. Now she has found a way to bring joy and comfort to the community through other skills, while everyone rides out this pandemic.

Scott, an accomplished and professional seamstress as well as music educator, has been making face masks. She has donated over 80 to the Community Kitchen in Morgantown. She has made some available to the members of her 120-member Community Choir, many members of whom are elderly and living alone. She volunteers to pick up and deliver groceries for them. She has turned to baking, as a way to pass time and feed her choir crew.

Scott said she’s gone from too much to do in her duties at WVU, to having way too much time on her hands.

Her banana bread, carrot cake, hot cross buns and various assorted cookies come out of her oven and get packed into her car, and she drives around leaving her “care baskets” of groceries, masks and baked goods at the doors of many in the Morgantown community.

She once had an incorrect address for a choir member, and instead introduced herself and left her goods with a lonely elderly woman within the same housing complex.

“Fran’s (choir member) goodies can wait until next week this time around. It just seemed the right thing to do to leave this batch with her neighbor. It felt like showing up at the mistaken address was meant to be” Scott said.

When she is not baking or sewing, Scott is spending her time creating online ensemble opportunities for her choirs.

“There may not necessarily be a lot of quality musical instruction going on right now, but people seem to be enjoying this substitute outlet for getting together to make music.”

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