HOME COOKIN’
With live concerts on hold, Nashville students perform for music lovers via video conference
It took only a few gentle bars of violin before Jodi Richfield started feeling the tears well up behind her closed eyes. If the music — the first movement of Henri Vieuxtemps’s Violin Concerto No. 4 in D Minor — hadn’t taken a sudden turn into jagged shards of dissonance, she might have lost it on the spot. Instead, she suddenly opened her watery eyes and focused on the performer, transfixed.
Richfield hadn’t been expecting much from the strangest concert she had ever attended — seated next to her mother in the kitchen of her Nashville home, the music filtered thinly through the internal speaker of her computer, violinist Abby Reed standing alone in her bedroom at her own house across town, the third and fourth windows of the Zoom video conference occupied by a music teacher and a reporter.
She had never met any of them, and yet here they were, virtually, in her kitchen.
But somewhere among the beauty of the composition, the beauty of the performance and the overwhelming beauty of the moment — months into a coronavirus pandemic that had left her, her husband and her 86-year-old mother isolated together at home — Richfield, a regular symphony patron during normal times, felt something she hadn’t felt in what seemed like ages and wasn’t sure she would feel again in ages more: the transportive power of live music.
“I was about to break into tears,” Richfield said into her computer to the smiling image of Reed at the end of the latter’s three-piece, 15-minute performance, which also included a couple of J.S. Bach partitas for solo violin. “It was so moving to me.”
“I love performing,” Reed said from her bedroom, under the dull glow of an overhead light, a crisply made bed in the background, a bouquet of flowers on the dresser. “I love how this gives me some experience as a performer and also helps people feel like they’re transported to a different place.”
It was a moment, amid all this darkness, to marvel at the sustaining genius and brilliance of mankind:
The great composers, for one thing.
The performers, such as Reed, a 17-year-old rising high school senior.
The architects of the now-ubiquitous video conferencing apps, which allowed this virtual moment to happen.
And then, too, the kind-hearted vision of Zack Ebin.
Ebin is the music teacher who sat in on Reed’s Zoom violin concert for Richfield and her mother on that Wednesday night in May, taking notes to go over with her later.
In fact, Ebin, the senior director of Suzuki Violin at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, has been sitting in on a half-dozen or more of these virtual concerts each week, about 60 in all — ever since he hatched the idea back in March to bring together music students who had lost their performance opportunities with music lovers who had lost their connection to the music.
The idea was born from a desire to do something nice for Ebin’s parents, isolated in Stony Brook, N.Y. David and Barbara Ebin have four children, including Zack, and 11 grandchildren, and almost all of them are musicians. With everyone isolated from each other by the coronavirus, Zack decided to organize an all-family concert over Zoom. It was such a hit, he knew he needed to expand it.
Ebin’s new second job as an online concert promoter began with a few phone calls, then a debut concert pairing his two older children — eight-year-old Zev, a violinist, and five-year-old Ezra, a cellist — and a Nashville assisted living and a memory-care home called Abe’s Garden. Residents there, through the wonders of technology, gathered around a computer in a common area or watched from their own rooms, their spirits raised both by the performances and the kids’ enthusiastic bows at the end.
Over time, Ebin quickly came to understand and appreciate the power of Zoom’s administrative mute function, to turn off the microphones of all but the performers, but you can’t always control the whims of a five-year-old cellist — which was made clear the time Ezra whipped off his button-down shirt, which he had protested wearing in the first place, at the end of a performance, all of it captured on the camera of the Ebins’ computer.
The Abe’s Garden concerts were eventually expanded to full, 45-minute extravaganzas twice a week, featuring six or seven performers, each in their own homes. But even that wasn’t enough to satisfy the performance needs of all of Ebin’s students, and the other students, from kindergartners to collegians, across the different programs at Blair School of Music — all of whom had seen their spring recitals, concerts and even touring opportunities erased by the coronavirus outbreak.
So Ebin decided to open the Zoom concert series to the public, starting with an email blast to all the patrons on the school’s mailing list and eventually through the Nashville media and word of mouth.
“It’s heartbreaking we have to do this,” Ebin said, “but it’s also uplifting that we can.”
The response was overwhelming. The list of performers grew to include not only string players but pianists and flutists, from five-yearold Suzuki students to 21-year-old college seniors and even an occasional faculty member. Audience slots began filling up, first days and then weeks in advance. Mother’s Day was an especially hot ticket — four separate concerts that day, four more each on the Saturday before and the Monday after.
Eventually, Ebin could barely keep it all straight — which is where Nora Wang came in. Wang, a 17-year-old violin student at Blair with deep skills in the art of organization, began as a performer in the Zoom concerts, but perhaps recognizing an operation in need of some organization skills, offered to be Ebin’s assistant. The offer was quickly accepted.
Wang eventually took over running the Tuesday night Zoom concerts at Abe’s Garden, lining up the musicians and audience members, maintaining an Excel spreadsheet with the schedule, sending out the Zoom links, introducing each performer during the video conference and facilitating some friendly dialogue at the end.
“I’d performed at retirement homes in the past, and it was always amazing to see how grateful everyone was,” Wang said. “But performing for the same people online in some ways is even more meaningful, because with everyone isolated, you can see how much people need that connection, that interaction.”