UNITY-- This year, members of the Unity Music Festival Association chose to recognize the many contributions of Morag Riddell, in awarding their Volunteer of the Year plaque and flowers. Riddell joked afterwards that it was not a big surprise since, as president, she had to sign all the winners’ certificates, including her own.
Kathy Soloski, MC at the final performances April 13, detailed Riddell’s involvement with the Unity Music Festival as follows.
Morag’s Mum was an accomplished pianist and bought the family a piano in the mid-1970s. Morag grew up in Saskatoon and took piano and vocal lessons as a teenager.
Her first involvement with the Unity Music Festival began in 1990. Morag was teaching in Senlac and the teacher who was supposed to lead the school choir couldn’t attend the performance day, so Morag stepped in as the conductor. She says, “I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing.”
Undeterred, in 1991, Morag put her own choir from Senlac School into the music festival and was helped greatly by her accompanist, Iris Brown.
In 1996 Morag joined the Unity Public School staff and participated in the Unity Music Festival with various classes in spoken word, and diversified the festival with French spoken word and French songs.
Then, in 2012, Morag attended her first music festival meeting and was surprised to return home without a job. However, when she returned in 2013, she quickly became vice-president.
In 2015, Morag assumed the position of president and, with Morag’s strong interest and capability in technology, she pushed for online registration and started a website for the association.
By this time, Morag was teaching at Unity Composite High School, so she also participated in the music festival with her senior French class doing French poems and [with] her English language arts class doing spoken word. Morag continued with this participation until she retired from teaching in June of 2022.
With music festival planning and registrations well underway, the March 2020 shutdown due to Covid meant cancelling our in-person festival and pivoting to online performances.
In September 2020 Morag became past president but continued to use her technology expertise to help keep our music festival relevant and up to date with the rapid changes affecting our world.
The Carol Festival in December 2020 still could not be in person so Morag started our Facebook page to allow participants to post videos of performances for our online Carol Festival.
Morag returned to the role of president in September of 2023 and continues in that role today.
She has contributed in so many other ways to make our annual music festival a success.
Thank you, Morag, for your time, expertise, energy and thinking ‘outside the box.’ We appreciate you very much.
