STRIKING A CHORD
Musicians bow to the gains and losses that pandemic isolation imposes
One by one, symphonies, operas and chamber societies confirm the earliest the show will go on is 2021, and so musicians have resigned ourselves to live streams and pre-recordings that allow us to keep our audiences and some semblance of our paycheques.
As a violinist, I hope that something of the streams’ sensibility survives, but nothing can replicate the essential recklessness of live performance.
To be a musician means accepting a certain form of isolation as a mandate. You spend a lifetime taunting yourself into the practice room, where, if you are lucky enough to have a window, you can watch the sun go down on your social life while you brood over each note. You have made a bargain: Eventually you will get to share what you have learned with present, listening people. In isolation, however, the terms of that bargain have changed.
Quarantine yields to performers what they supposedly need to work: indefinite time at a vast remove. I have found some vexed pleasure in practising caprices, short technical exercises, by the 18th-century violinist Pierre Rode. Some days, I think this glut of time is an offering. More often, however, it’s a force-feeding. To have ideas, you need constraints, which for us were the auditions, rehearsals and performances dribbled across our calendars. Now that those boundaries have evaporated, I have begun to realize how much I depended on them and how much my relationship with music was predicated on feeling present with others, both in the audience and onstage. If a sonata falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it make a sound?
In isolation, I have worked on solo repertoire, pieces that are solvent without collaborators — a kind of musical disaster-prepping for a lonely future. I congratulate myself on what a responsible musician I’m being, though it’s a perverse twist on the violinist’s fantasy: Finally, music that puts all eyes on you alone — and there’s no one to witness it. One night, though, I get lucky. There is a toddler on the street.
“Hey!” he yells. He issues a single clap, and I beam as though it is a bouquet.
This homebound summer has been particularly unsettling for classical musicians, whose typical schedule guarantees a few months of debauched itinerancy at festivals across the world. I usually learn more about music during the summer than I learn in all the other months. It makes an awful sense, then, that a program I attended a year ago would become my closest reference for how to approach music during the pandemic.
About 30 of us cloistered ourselves in wooden cabins, where we practised alone and rehearsed together. Five weeks into the program, I woke up feeling odd. I suspected Lyme. I tested negative for the disease — with Lyme, that is possible in the early stages of infection — and they sent me back to campus.
So commenced the sickest period of my life. I couldn’t stand for long. In the ER a few days later, to address an unbearable bout of nausea, shaking under an ambitious Kleenex that the nurse had described as a blanket, I reviewed the score in my head. Stumped, the doctor sent me back to campus that same night.
As much pain as I was in, I never considered going home. I had not come so far just to be comfortable. The quartet itself, a web of confounding, ecstatic harmony was not comfortable. To play it was to feel like I had a chance to hold the gaze of a strange animal. I had hoped that serving this music would redeem me, that we could prove we were worthy of touching it. But lying here, tracing the second movement in my head, was all my body could do just then, and thus it was all I could ask for. On the occasions that the illness relented, I practised and rehearsed.
For musicians, performance seems to promise a kind of parole from the body: After sufficient exertion and hours of practice, the score becomes so intuitive that to play it is no longer a matter of physical execution, but rather pure feeling. But that transcendence of bodily constraints is an illusion — now, in this pandemic, more than ever. When I could not play, I had accused myself of surrendering. In fact, I was manoeuvring through the din of illness to find, and value, what was possible. It was a new kind of listening. We could also call it humility.
For the next two months, until I could see a doctor back home, I was sick. On concert day, though, I celebrated: I had woken up without my body making a fuss, and I presumed the illness was starting to subside. In the third movement, however, a wrenching headache set in.
At one of the final cues, I met the violist’s eyes dead on. What was her expression — fear? No, something adjacent: acceptance that we could not always understand or control the circumstances before us, but that we were going to see them through.