The good news regarding this year's Cedar Commissions series is the application process behind it began last spring. The bad news, of course, is everything that's happened since then.
"These hardworking artists have been pulled in a lot of different directions," said the Cedar Cultural Center's communications manager, Aida Shahghasemi.
Featuring six thematic sets of music and storytelling written specifically for the occasion — all funded via Jerome Foundation grants — the Cedar Commissions has been recast as a virtual festival, streaming Friday through Sunday via mandolin.com or thecedar.org.
However, organizers are sticking to the same game plan from the series' 2011 inception to present a broad range of new voices from within the Cedar's diverse community — which might be as important as ever this year.

The list of 2021 commissioned acts range from a rock and hip-hop artist singing about Hmong and LGBTQ cultures' complicated relationship, to a classical composer exploring mental illness, to a guitar-strumming Black Muslim singer/songwriter.
"It's artists from all different walks of life," said the latter entertainer, Hassan Shahid, who performs under the name Shahidi.
That the show is happening at all may come as a surprise, since the Cedar has not been open to the public since last March. Last year's Commissions series was actually one of the last events at the 32-year-old nonprofit venue in Minneapolis' Cedar-Riverside neighborhood.
But Cedar staffers — many of them furloughed over the past 11 months — returned several weeks ago to begin rehearsing and pre-filming this weekend's performances without any audience.