The future of music in America: the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Abstract

“But get me a musician.” And then, while the musician was playing, the power of the Lord came upon him (2 Kings 3:15). This verse from the Old Testament describes how the prophet Elisha called on God to perform a miracle. There was a desperate need to fill a dry ravine with water. Music became the instrument of rescue, and the musician the giver of a new lease on life. The idea that music was in some measure a privileged means of communication, a bridge between the human and the divine, and thereby crucial to alleviating human distress through its capacity to bring forth the power of God, has never entirely vanished from our collective consciousness, despite the increased dominance of the secular over the sacred in Western history since the late eighteenth century. A case in point from the far more recent past can be found in H. G. Adler’s magisterial and exhaustive 1955 study, Theresienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of a Coerced Community. Adler, himself a survivor but not a musician, understood that performing music and listening to music in the camp by the incarcerated inmates, which had once “fulfilled a real need,” had become a “curse” when music making ceased to be voluntary and became subject to the sadistic whim and orders of the SS. But for a long stretch of time, concerts by inmates—Adler cites performances of music by Beethoven and Brahms by fellow prisoners—were “triumphs of pure morality over the adversity of an almost unbearable present.” Not because it was a means to an end (e.g., water), but music alone elicited the capacity for hope and goodness—theologically speaking, gifts of the divine located in the biblical account of creation. They were brought forth by the playing and hearing of music. A renewal of faith in this theological image and in the justification of music as indispensable to life and therefore hope and survival in dark and difficult times would be welcome as each of us struggles with isolation, fear, and danger during the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This editorial is being written in July 2020, some five months into the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world beginning in the winter. Of all the places hit hard by the coronavirus, the United States has seen the highest number of cases and deaths, disproportionately among the poor and the non-white population, and has exhibited startling incompetence and confusion, led by an ill-prepared, mendacious, and irresponsible Federal Government. The United States has been hampered by its inadequate and discriminatory healthcare system, the evisceration of long-established resources in scientific and medical expertise, and a public health system dominated by private enterprise. To make matters worse, the pandemic occurred while the nation and its public institutions were paralyzed by a polarized political and cultural environment, in which fragmented extremist fantasies and conspiracy theories that undermine science have flourished within the population, pitting citizens against one another and depressing any shared sense of a common cause. Public life and therefore public culture were abruptly shut down in America, as they were all over the world. The response in the United States, however, was not uniform, thereby prolonging the agony. Music making along with all manner of public events and rituals were casualties. I remember vividly canceling, on March 12, 2020, after the dress rehearsal on the day of the concert, an all-Duke Ellington program at Carnegie Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra and the pianist Marcus Roberts and his ensemble. Every musician on stage realized that something unprecedented in their lives was happening. We understood, as all venues closed and the rest of the 2020 season in New York was canceled, that it was, at best, uncertain not only when the normalcy to which we had been accustomed would return, but also whether something akin to the past would ever resume. And if it would not, what would the future hold. Outside of the United States, for the public sphere that includes sports, religious observance, recreation, and the amateur and professional world of theater, dance, and music, one can reasonably expect that the interruption, no matter how long, will be temporary. The pandemic may leave few long-term residues and scars with respect to the performing arts in Europe and Asia. The governments on the European continent, and in Asia as well, seem prepared to restore institutional subsidies, sustain the livelihoods of artists, and resume programs of education in the performing arts, particularly in the concert, opera, and chamber music tradition of music. In these cultures, the shared acoustic experience in real time and space, for the listener, the performer, and the composer, is highly prized and deemed indispensable. The concert halls and orchestras of Europe and Asia are springing back to life, and gradually, over time, and with a sense of security that the danger has passed, with or without a va