ALLENTOWN, Pa. — For two decades, Thanksgiving time has brought, just as sure as turkey, the year's nominations for the Lehigh Valley Music Awards (LVMA) — a popular event that honored the area's working musicians.
But for the third straight year, the holiday passed with the LVMA silent.
The website for the Greater Lehigh Music Association, which coordinated the awards, is gone, and the last post on its Facebook page is from 2020, announcing the resignation of its longtime president, Gloria Domina.
Rick Flores, who took over the reins of the awards from Domina, said recently that the LVMA is still alive and will move forward — though not this year.
- Lehigh Valley Music Awards has been dormant for nearly three years and likely won't be held this year, but hopes are returning
- One option would be ArtsQuest, the organization that presents Musikfest, taking over the awards
- A new award, the ABE Regional Music Awards, says it will seek to fill the void
As it looks to the future, the awards even eventually may fall under the purview of ArtsQuest, the Bethlehem nonprofit that puts on the massive Musikfest festival, Flores said.
But a longtime Lehigh Valley music promoter and supporter said another year without local music awards is unacceptable.
"Doing nothing is no longer an option," Sam Younes, a formerly longtime area music promoter and now a music supporter, wrote on the popular Lehigh Valley-Eastern Pa Music Scene page he administers on Facebook.
"I would like to see an awards show return even if it's a scaled-back model," Younes wrote, adding that he hopes to make it happen this year.
Younes has started a new group, the ABE Regional Music Awards (ABE stands for Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton), that also has its own Facebook page and is seeking people to help the new group pick up the mantle of the LVMA.
Among his advisers is Domina, the former LVMA president.
LVMA take hiatus
For 20 years, Lehigh Valley Music Awards honored regional musicians with an annual awards show. Started by Bruce White, known professionally as Ian Bruce, the awards' first few years saw it shuffle along as a rag-tag affair at The Meadows in Hellertown and Brew Works in Allentown.
Domina took over the awards in 2008 and raised its profile to a full, on-stage awards show attended by nearly 1,000 people a year — first at Allentown Symphony Hall, then the Scottish Rite Cathedral in Allentown and, finally, for seven years at Musikfest Cafe at the ArtsQuest Center in Bethlehem.
But just a month after the awards ceremony in 2020, COVID-19 hit, wiping out the live music scene for a year.
Then, on the awards' Facebook page, it was announced Domina had resigned from the awards association board to retire and split her time between Bethlehem and Delaware.
"When COVID hit in 2020 and we had our last show, it was a no-brainer to not do it the next year," Flores said. “The eligibility period was compromised by COVID itself.”
By late 2021, Flores said he felt the Lehigh Valley music scene hadn't sufficiently returned to hold 2022 awards. And even this year, "we had felt that we weren’t sure if the scene was where it needed to be yet," he said.
In addition, Flores said, he found it hard to replace all of the work that Domina had done herself.
“Gloria stepping down is, quite frankly, much more difficult to recover from than we expected," he said. "You could imagine — Gloria’s been here for the length of it... It's big shoes to fill."
Flores said the LVMA board is "still working with our lawyers to figure out what is the appropriate next steps.
“Our goal is to work with ArtsQuest and our legal team, and by the end of [the first quarter of 2023], figure out what we’re doing. But at this point, there’s a good chance that we’re going to restructure everything.”
Domina said she's a fan of the LVMA.
“I wanted it to grow," she said. "To me, it was like a baby, and then it was into adulthood. I gave it its wings and I really wanted to see it grow and do great things in the future... I only want good for the organization.
“The thing is, once you stop or slow down or don’t do something for this many years, you lose momentum. And you never get that back.”
ArtsQuest takeover?
Flores said he and the LVMA board twice talked with ArtsQuest about doing "a hybrid type of show" for the awards.
"They were using their hybrid model at the time, where they wanted to do an online type of component and charge people to watch it," he said.
"Doing nothing is no longer an option."Sam Younes, local music supporter and former music promoter
But he said the awards' "profit line for the show is very lean, and having this hybrid model online, we just didn’t feel that we would cover costs at all. And the last thing we needed to do was sink us financially.”
Domina said she thinks the LVMA doing virtual award shows during the pandemic, perhaps with a digital compilation of the nominees, would have worked.
“If having musicians send in a video and having a videographer do a small snippet… and you’re doing the voting online and that’s not costing you anything, why would it have been so much money?” she said.
Flores said the LVMA board also has talked with ArtsQuest "about what it would look like if they’d take this on."
When the LVMA and ArtsQuest first joined to hold the awards show at Musikfest Cafe in 2013, they stressed it was to “pool resources” and not a merger.
But the idea of ArtsQuest taking over the awards has "been on the table forever," Flores said.
"The real concern there is how do you do it the right way? As soon as something like that would happen, we would feed right into the negative talk that has always been about whether that was happening or not. And I think that’s unfair because I think we can all step back and say that ArtsQuest has done some very positive good for the area and the scene.
“But how do you do it in a way that still does honor the fact that we do have to have small-minded thinking in this in order to really support the fabric of the scene? ... So that’s kind of where we sit."
ArtsQuest Chief Programming Officer Patrick Brogan, who directed the awards show during the years it was at Musikfest Cafe, did not respond to emails and phone messages seeking comment.
ArtsQuest Communications Director Shannon Keith said she believed Brogan referred questions to the LVMA, but offered no further comment.
New awards, big changes
Younes started the ABE Regional Music Awards page on Facebook last month after, he said, “three years of not seeing anything happen or no movement” with the LVMA.
He said people interested in helping can contact him through the page.
“You can’t allow it not to happen again," said Younes, who previously owned U-Walk Entertainment, a concert promotion company. “We’re trying to put something together.”
Whether the new award will be held in 2023 is "going to come down to whether we can pull some sponsors," he said.
"But a lot of people want it to come back."
Domina said Younes enlisted her as an adviser, and for the past three months they've "been in conversation about when to do it, where to do it."
“Somebody’s always going to compare it to something else, but I want it to be fresh and new and different,” she said.
Younes and Domina said there will be significant differences between the new awards and the LVMA — including doing away with choosing winners through public voting.
“It can’t be the way it was done previously," Younes said. "A popularity contest; I’m not interested in being part of something like that."
“Somebody’s always going to compare it to something else, but I want it to be fresh and new and different.”Gloria Domina, adviser to ABE Regional Music Awards
Instead, the nominees — and award-winners — would be chosen by a select panel, much as it is done by the Grammy Awards, Younes said.
"I’m not big on asking the overall community for nominations," he said. "I think you’ve got to come up with the nominations yourself."
Allie Santos, president of Munopco Music Theater in Allentown and a multiple LVMA winner, has agreed to be a board member for the ABE Regional Music Awards.
Santos said she agreed with Younes.
She said awards should be chosen by "a selected group of people, let’s call it 30, that are hush-hush, they’re not known to everybody that they’re going to be out at gigs, and they should be out and actually listening to people live."
“There should have been so many other aspects than just who’s the most popular because their name is listed everywhere on a marquee. There are so many talented people in the Lehigh Valley, and I don’t think that everybody was given a fair shot."
The LVMA's Flores said he, too, looked at having a voting board like The Grammys, rather than an open vote.
“But I haven’t found a solid solution because the vetting process for that would be so lengthy for an organization that doesn’t have the staff and resources to do so,” he said.
He said LVMA's "Industry Ballot" awards are voted on by 150-160 people who were vetted to make sure they were part of the music scene.
“I always envisioned that that would be great for that ballot, but [there was] always the ‘How to?”
Other proposed changes
The fact that some acts were perennial winners for the LVMA, chosen by public voting, drew frequent criticism.
For example, veteran country rocker Scott Marshall got the most nominations for each of the last five years of the awards, with a record 14 nominations for the 2018 ceremony. In a seven-year stretch, he got 82 nominations and won 40 awards.
James Supra won the award for best harmonicist for the LVMA's first 19 years straight before removing himself from contention.
Younes said his vision for the ABE Regional Awards is that "if you win an award, you’re not eligible to win the same category the following year."
In fact, Younes said he envisions an overall reduced awards show.
“We can’t have all these categories — for a bass player, and drummer. At one point you’re watering it down," he said, referring to the fact LVMA had years in which it handed out nearly 100 awards.
"For the blues category, it would be one — band and solo artist all in one. Not a band, a singer, this, that."
Younes noted that other music award shows in Pennsylvania — "Central PA, Philly, Northeastern PA, they have a lot less categories.”
He also said the ABE Awards show would be in a smaller venue — perhaps a theater.
"Put it this way — it’s not going to be at ArtsQuest," Younes said. "I think ArtsQuest made it a little too fluffy, so to say. Too predictable. It has to return to being music-driven. It has to actually get smaller — and what I mean by that is the length of the show, less awards, more focus."
Younes, Domina and Santos all said that most importantly, the new awards should be more diverse.
“I want the music community to be more involved," Domina said. "I want it to be more diverse. More diversity on the board as far as age, ethnicity, the genres and all of that.
"And focusing on youth and new musicians and musicians making a difference is what I really, really love.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: John J. Moser is LehighValleyNews.com's deputy director for news. He's also a longtime Lehigh Valley music critic and entertainment writer who has been recognized by the Lehigh Valley Music Awards for writing and lifetime achievement.
