Making Music During Quarantine

Made on Easil

2020 has been rough. I personally would shave a year off the end of my life if it meant skipping over 2020. 

The very existence of many music-related industries is threatened. Live music, live theatre, opera, orchestras, choirs.... all teetering on the precipice of potential extinction. (To be quite frank, some of these organizations' unions needed an overall anyway). 

Unless....

We accept the circumstances and make lemonade from this gnarly lemons.

Yeah, these lemons definitely came from the bottle of the barrel. At a time where the cost of living in is at an all-time high and wages have stagnated as college tuition prices have sky-rocketed.... it is totally valid to feel betrayed, anxious, angry, frustrated, hopeless, bereft, listless, heartbroken as a musician, actor, dancer, composer, conductor, private teacher. Once we move through these feelings, even if it lasts for a few hopeful minutes, let us look at some creative ways musicians are still sharing their work:

• Livestream concerts where the performer(s) may opt to take requests (sometimes in the form of venmo comments; totally legit)
• Video collaborations like school concerts that were cancelled
• Virtual solo & ensemble adjudication for students whose physical solo & ensemble events were cancelled
• Sharing videos of singing, playing, poetry, reading, sometimes attached to a fundraiser
• Wide access to free Broadway shows and Met Operas online
• Wider access to private lessons from teachers all over the world
• Recitals from professional opera singers
• ASL version of Newsies
• Virtual musical collaborations from around the world

In the midst of a particularly dark moment, my friend was giving a livestream concert on facebook, of their original songs as well as some Joni Mitchell and Dolly Parton covers. At the time, I was trying to motivate myself to just put some clothes on and play chess with my husband so that I could motivate my body to move and try to move through my depression. I needed to hear their music so darn badly. I needed to hear those words, hear a gorgeous Steinway piano, and lovely tenor voice to remind me that music was still alive and well. That music was still happening and still healing. More than 200 people tuned in within an hour and expressed similar sentiments of hope and healing.

I know we're all scared and uncertain of what will happen to our physical and social art forms during this time of quarantine but music is mobile and fluid. It will find a way to be made because it has to be made- it's part of our DNA. 

Keep sharing your music. You never know who you might heal.... it may even be yourself.

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche