Music Teacher Lifted Friends Through Pandemic with ‘Quarantunes’

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Melody Stevens sent an audio recording a day to family and friends for nearly the entire time Broadway shows were dark during the pandemic – 539 songs.

By Elizabeth Wulfhorst

With a surge in COVID-19 cases because of the Omicron variant, it may seem like 2021 is becoming a déjà vu of 2020. So if we have to go back into lockdown – even for a short period of time – everyone who enjoys music should quickly find a friend like Melody Stevens.

The current choir and band director at Red Bank Catholic high school, Stevens has spent her entire life living up to her name. She owned and ran a music school for 20 years, taking a break at the end of 2018 to regroup, volunteer with her daughter’s high school musical theater department and begin cultivating a private teaching practice.

“In the last several years of the business, I’d had three locations and I was really purely administrative and I’d gotten out of the music (part of it),” Stevens said.

In March 2020 she was teaching voice and piano students at another music school when she found out Broadway had gone dark. A week or so later she resolved to keep the music going even though the pandemic paused nearly everything else.

“It was March 24 when I decided, you know, we’re all quarantined. All the gigs and concerts are canceled. Choir is dangerous. Teaching voice is dangerous. Like, all of a sudden I had a hazardous job,” she said. “Everything went online, all the voice teaching, even the piano teaching. It was just so wild and weird. So I said, ‘Okay, what can I do? What can I do to be helpful? What can I do to just give a good piece of myself out into the world and see what happens?’ ”

Thus the idea for “Quarantunes” was born.

Originally conceived as a “one-day-at-a-time concert until Broadway reopened,” Stevens texted a friend and asked if he’d like to receive an audio recording of her singing a song each day. He thought it was a great idea and she slowly began adding recipients: a sister, a cousin, fellow musicians.

“I would call people up and in a few weeks it became not only the music but also a way to stay connected with friends and family,” she said.

The list quickly grew to 20 and then eventually to 46 as Broadway stayed shuttered. Stevens texted an audio file to each recipient every morning at 8 a.m. “without fail.”

Being a lifelong teacher, she also included information about the pieces she was singing.

“I researched the songs. The music teacher in me came out,” she said. “I taught music theory lessons with a song. Everything was accompanied by a writing.”

“Sometimes it tied into my life,” she said. One of the songs she sent was “Night and Day” by Cole Porter, written for the 1932 musical “Gay Divorce.” It just happens to be her wedding song, so that Quarantune included the story of how Stevens and her husband met.

All told, Stevens sent out 539 Quarantunes, the last one Sept. 14, 2021, when major Broadway shows like “Hamilton” and “The Lion King” reopened. Fittingly, the first Quarantune was “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from “Carousel” and the last was “On Broadway,” made popular in 1978 by Grammy-winning singer George Benson.

“Some people would listen to the songs every day. Some people just enjoyed reading the writings that went with thesong. Some people did both. God bless my friend Ross,” she said. “He commented on all 539 Quarantunes.”

Following the sentiment of her first song, Stevens didn’t “walk alone” on this project, enlisting help from others to contribute about 100 songs.

“I had some of my private students who I was teaching online, I had them do a Quarantune if they worked up a song that was particularly good or if it fit my story,” she said, “and I also asked several of my talented colleagues to submit Quarantunes so they could join in the fun.

But Stevens made “well over 400” of the recordings, including 14 original songs she wrote during the pandemic. “I had never written a song in my life,” she said.

She also managed to record and send out daily tunes even when she contracted COVID in January 2021, shortly before she was eligible for the vaccine.

“You know, COVID, with all the phlegm, gave my voice kind of a gritty sound,” she said. “So I sang Bob Dylan and The Who, mostly” during that time.

Throughout the process Stevens waited for inspiration when choosing the next day’s tune and her selections were certainly eclectic, running the musical gamut from rock to show tunes to opera.

“The styles were all over the map,” she said. “Everything from ‘Highway to Hell’ by AC/DC to ‘O mio babbino caro’ by Puccini.”

Stevens’ family and friends weren’t the only ones who benefitted from her musical talents and heartfelt largesse. She said doing Quarantunes – the name comes courtesy of her niece – kept her practicing, with some songs taking her many hours to learn. It also reconnected her to colleagues with whom she has formed a band, Way Past Midnight, because that is when they can get together to rehearse.

Quarantunes, for her, was never a chore, never something she dreaded having to do each day.

“It was a joy and a pleasure and a labor of love. I managed to, my goodness, just work up my musicianship – singing, piano – to a level that it’s never been,” she said.

“I was always deeply grateful for Quarantunes.”

This article originally appeared in the Dec. 23, 2021 – Jan. 5, 2022 print edition of The Two River Times.