The music stopped, but the band is ready
The day starts with snow, but it’s ending with sunlight and a wind that smells like spring.
The Nightingale Fiddlers are warming up in at Ivoryton’s gazebo. The group came together five years ago at Nightingale Acoustic Café in Old Lyme. They are adult beginners and accomplished musicians. Some read music. Some play by ear. When they’re not performing, they are engineers and teachers and people of uncertain provenance.
Every year — every nonpandemic year, that is — the group’s oeuvre shifts with the turn of the calendar page, says Dana Takaki, band member and a classically trained violinist. They swing from Christmas music to Irish to Americana, dance lightly through some classical music, and then they go back to Christmas, when the swing starts all over again.
This is the Irish part of their year — mournful songs sung at a pace that doesn’t seem sad at all. It is perfect for the day.
Takaki plays with the New Britain Symphony Orchestra and Chorus of Westerly when those organizations have concerts. She said she played more than 100 shows in 2019. In 2020, she played around 20. The last place the Nightingale Fiddles played before everything shut down in March 2020 was Fiddleheads Food Co-op in New London. When they finished, one of the patrons was crying. No one had any idea what we were facing. We just knew it would be scary and hard. Maybe that patron had a sense of how quiet things would be without live music in public places.
We lost the music, as we’ve lost beloved people, and sometimes, hope. We’ve lost and missed so much, some of it strictly symbolic but important all the same.
As has been the case for nearly a year, Ivoryton’s small green is mostly deserted as the Nightingales unload their instruments. Has every small Connecticut town felt abandoned this past year? Local restaurants have been mostly take-out, though that’s changing. Ivoryton’s historic library across the street from the gazebo first went online, and now allows for scheduled in-person browsing. Patrons can also call and have books/puzzles/ what-have-you left for them on the porch in a bag with their names on it.
Every town and every entity in the state has found new ways to exist, from one-way aisles in the grocery stores to signs that encourage social distancing and masking. What’s been challenging in Ivoryton hasn’t necessarily been what we’ve added to exist during a pandemic. It doesn’t take a genius to wear a mask or observe traffic patterns at the Big Y.
But there’s been something essential that’s been taken away in this little river town known for townwide parties. Those include December’s Illumination, October’s Pumpkin Festival, and the Fourth of July parade that includes fire trucks, floats, and a large pig that once lived in town and developed a fan base. All events were modified or put on hold until better days returned.
This year, the town had Christmas lights, but no large hunt for the shelf on the elf, no Santa flipping the light switch, no public caroling, though just about every night, some family came to this same gazebo — lit bright for the season — and let their children run through the dreamscape volunteers create every year.
When you’re hunkered down and trying to live through a pandemic, you don’t dare stop to think about what life will be like when the virus is no longer a threat, when we can gather at the green for concerts and carve pumpkins as a town.
But better days could be coming. Recently, Gov. Ned Lamont lowered the eligibility for COVID vaccinations to people age 55 and above, which encompasses slightly less than a quarter of the state’s population. The next age group’s turn is just around the corner, and then the one after that and after that. President Joe Biden said all adults should be vaccinated by Memorial Day or thereabouts. The one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine just arrived in the state. The state positivity rate has dropped.
Might it be time for just a little music?
On this day in Ivoryton, temperatures will drop 20 degrees and the next day will be frigid, with wind that will rattle windows. But tonight?
Yes to fiddle music, especially fiddle music that’s lights up a too-quiet town green. Five musicians playing fiddles, a guitar, a whistle, and a bodhrán stand distanced and ready. Brian Schiller’s beard bulges from beneath his mask.
“What key are we in?” asks Michael Harris, another fiddler. B? D? Does it matter? It’s “Rosin the Bow,” and they’re off. A woman wanders by with a tiny dog on a leash. They’re wearing matching sweaters. An older man stops to lean against a light post. The music picks up steam and the band members sing a lusty “When I’m dead and laid out on the counter.” It is an audience of two, one nodding in time, and another smiling toward the gazebo. Better days ahead? Could be.
BARCELONA, Spain — Several hundred protesters marched Saturday in Spain’s northeastern city of Barcelona against the authorities’ crackdown following a violent outcry over the imprisonment of Pablo Hasel, an anti-establishment artist.
Saturday’s march took place amid a heavy police presence, winding through several avenues of the Catalan regional capital. Protesters walked behind a banner that called for the release of Hasel and his jailed supporters.
The rapper is serving nine months for inciting terrorism — he has praised two now-defunct armed groups responsible for killing over 900 people in Spain — and for refusing to pay a fine for insulting Spain’s former king.
His arrest on Feb. 16 triggered a mix of peaceful and violent protests that have at times ended in the looting of shops in several cities. The case has also invigorated a debate over the limits of freedom of speech in Spain.
Spain’s ruling left-wing coalition has pledged to launch a legal reform to eliminate prison terms for offenses involving freedom of speech. The coalition’s junior partner, the far-left United We Can party, has filed a petition to pardon Hasel.
Eight suspects have been jailed for being in a group that protested the rapper’s imprisonment by setting fire to a police van in which an officer narrowly escaped the flames.
They face possible charges of attempted homicide, assaulting law enforcement officers and forming part of a criminal group.