Lawrence students’ last performance goes viral
When leaders at Lawrence University decided to move to remote coursework and canceled all campus events for the forthcoming spring trimester, students in the school’s music conservatory knew they’d lost something central to their college experience: the ability to play on stage together.
So on Thursday, as students scrambled to make plans about what they’d do for the rest of their school year and as professors embarked on the work to move their courses online or to a remote format, a group of conservatory students reached out to Mark Dupere, director of orchestral studies at the Appleton university, asking if they could play together one last time.
The students hadn’t been rehearsing their star piece, Felix Mendelssohn’s “Elijah,” for very long, and the choir and orchestra had never performed it together. But could they pull together a performance the next day in the university chapel, just for fun?
Dupere thought maybe 30 or 40 students would show up. But when he got there, “pretty much every student in the whole choir and the whole orchestra was on stage, waiting,” said Brian Pertl, the conservatory’s dean.
A video clip of the spontaneous performance, made to a relatively tiny audience of conservatory staff faculty and students, has since gone viral on the conservatory’s Facebook page, with 61,000 views and 933 shares as of Monday afternoon.
At the end of the performance, the ensembles’ seniors stood for their customary recognition, the end of their college careers at the university.
It was beautiful, Pertl said, and the seniors took in a lengthy, tear-filled standing ovation.
“Music as medicine. Music as healing. Music as community,” the conservatory’s Facebook post said. “This is our beautiful Lawrence Conservatory.”
“It became sort of a bonding, beautiful moment of music-making and sort of the last gathering before nobody could really gather anymore,” Pertl said.
On Monday, three days after the rehearsal, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers banned all group gatherings larger than 50 people in Wisconsin in response to the coronavirus’ spread.
As curfews, closures and quarantines have kept people home around the country and the world, videos of art and community like the one from Lawrence have been exploding with support on social media, as people look for ways to maintain a sense of community, even from afar.
Music can be a strong tool for fostering that connection, Pertl said.
“This is like a perfect example of all of the students coming together just to make music together,” Pertl said. “It has a way to really mourn but celebrate and, in the worst of times, tap into that transcendent power of the musical experience.”
With the cancellation of in-person classes, the conservatory is looking for ways to be innovative in both teaching and sharing its work, from the expansion of online music lessons to live webcasts of performers playing for an online audience. They might have students in the small ensembles record their individual parts and then stitch the recordings together into one clip for a virtual performance, Pertl said.
“I think this is a really exciting time, amidst all of the scariness and this being forced upon us, to practice creativity and re-imagining how we make music together,” he said.
But for now, Pertl said, it was important to share at least a little clip of the rehearsal with the rest of the world.
“We’re being bombarded with all of this stuff that’s super scary and super anxiety provoking and I think we also need this,” he said. “We also need food for the soul. We also need music because this is what brings us together in the community.”