Due to the Corona situation, neither the European Summer Music Academy (ESMA) nor the Western Balkans Youth Orchestra could operate in 2020 as planned. Physical meetings to make music together were impossible in 2020. But the orchestra refused to accept the limitations of travel and joint music-making as a reason to rest.

In order to maintain the momentum and offer the young musicians of the Western Balkans an opportunity to make music together even in these difficult times, Artium Eudora, the supporting NGO behind both initiatives, started the project “Building Musical Bridges 2020 – ESMA and WBYO go virtual”, a cooperation with the sister project European Summer Music Academy. This allowed a virtual cooperation. Building Musical Bridges consisted of virtual master classes for violin, viola, violoncello, double bass, flute, piano and singing and resulted in the production of a number of video recordings now available on the Youtube channels of ESMA and WBYO.

For WBYO, the first recording marked a milestone: It was the first joint musical exercise of the young musicians across the Western Balkans borders, and at the same time it was its first distributed recording and assembly of the instruments for a joint production – a substantial technical challenge. See videos.

Charity concert on 15.02.2020 for WBYO

A successful charity concert in Aachen on 15.02.2020 generated additional funds for the development of the WBYO. By their musical contributions, lecturers and alumni of the ESMA European Summer Music Academy in Kosovo, who had travelled to Aachen for this purpose, showed their support for this project which ought to become the "big sister" of ESMA.