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Performance in a pandemic
Brentano String Quartet cellist Nina Lee makes music with students on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. Photo courtesy of Nina Lee
On March 6, just a month after the World Health Organization had declared “a public health emergency of international concern,” the Yale School of Music canceled a five-city East Coast tour that was to feature the Yale Philharmonia, Yale Schola Cantorum, and The Bach Choir, London. The latter had arrived from London 48 hours earlier, and a rehearsal had been held in New Haven. But with news that a member of the choir had been exposed to the novel coronavirus in London before arriving in Connecticut, and with an increase in coronavirus cases reported in New York City, where one performance was to take place, the tour was called off. The COVID-19 pandemic had arrived and a mad scramble had begun. With a finger on the pulse of what peer institutions were doing, and with guidance from health experts at Yale and federal agencies, YSM, by mid-March, had gone into lockdown. Everything “in person” was off. Life went online, including the school’s May 18 commencement.
Summer, normally a relatively quiet time at YSM, was busy with preparations for an uncertain future. In a period of intensive pandemic-related planning, the school was also reflecting on the past and the plague of systemic racism. “We must acknowledge and redress injustices to the YSM Black community and indeed all BIPOC who deserve our accountability,” the school’s leadership said in making “commitments to racial equity” in mid-June. “The many communications coming from faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends have helped inform and enlighten us.” Imposed quiet was in juxtaposition with necessary disquiet, on YSM’s digital-communication channels and in its empty facilities in New Haven and beyond. The Norfolk Chamber Music Festival/Yale Summer School of Music effectively shed the second half of its name and presented, as its 2020 season, broadcasts of performances from an otherwise empty venue, videos of concerts recorded during previous summers, and conversations about the repertoire. The Morse Summer Music Academy, which is part of YSM’s Music in Schools Initiative, adjusted to remote work, just as the larger program had in the springtime. Young musicians from the New Haven Public Schools were kept at a distance from YSM, where so many in past years had discovered much about themselves.
As unanswerable questions about making music in a pandemic rose to the surface of countless conversations, so, too, did frustrations with actually trying to make music online. Recognizing that online music instruction was hindered by inadequate audio, staff and administrators from YSM, with help from the university and more than 20 other schools in the United States and beyond, lobbied Zoom for an audio upgrade. The company, whose use had become ubiquitous, delivered an enhanced product in September, in time for the fall semester, which began with a mix of remote and in-person study and practice. As the semester began, all the planning that had gone into figuring out how to deliver an education to students carried an understood asterisk. The decision had been made to divide the semester into an in-person performance block bookended by two mostly-online academic blocks. The relative simplicity of that plan stood in contrast to the complexity of making it happen and making it work, which couldn’t possibly be guaranteed. Months were spent preparing YSM facilities for students’ return for the performance block in mid-October. Those months were
At the beginning of the first semester, the school shared on its social-media channels photographs of percussionist Russell Fisher ’20MMA ’26DMA taking a lesson, over Zoom, with faculty percussionist Robert van Sice. Typically, Fisher said, he and van Sice would be face to face, two marimbas between them with no space between the instruments. Because he’d been at Yale for a few years when the pandemic arrived, Fisher had access to the “sound bank” he’d built up during lessons with van Sice. When he’s looking for the right sound character, Fisher can visit that collection of sonic imprints. Students who began their studies at Yale in 2020, though, were at a loss in that area. In the fall, Fisher and his colleagues in YSM’s percussion program, led by van Sice, took deep dives into technique: grip, hand position, stick height—the “tiny little things that go a really long way,” Fisher said. And that was all well and good, and necessary, and efficient. But, Fisher said, “we do miss the ability to stand behind him and watch him play and hear what he hears,” to experience “all the things that were made virtually impossible in the springtime.”
What Fisher and his colleagues missed more than in-person lessons was the opportunity to work as an ensemble. “At least half the reason any of us come to Yale is to be in the Yale Percussion Group,” Fisher said. In early October, YSM percussionists were permitted to occupy the studio four at a time. The moment wasn’t lost on Fisher, who asked his colleagues, “Doesn’t it just feel almost emotional to be here, in the same room?” As the performance block began in mid-October, and the Yale Philharmonia gathered anew as a string ensemble alongside smaller groups that had to leave out singers and wind and brass players, Fisher reflected on the previous six months— during half of which school was in session but no one was making music in person. “The toughest pill to swallow,” he said, “was not being in a chamber group,” not experiencing the camaraderie that comes with making music together. Faculty clarinetist David Shifrin, who kept his studio open through the summer and joined recent grads and current and incoming students online each week to listen to one another play and to collaborate, said, “It’s painful and difficult and challenging” for students to be kept from working together in person, even as their peers were able to do so during the performance block. But “the students are resilient and resourceful and all about finding ways to do what they do and remaining part of a community,” he said. Wind players on opposite sides of the world are collaborating, Shifrin said, and those in New Haven are taking advantage of the school’s reconfigured facilities to safely rehearse for recitals.
Similarly, students in the Yale Opera program have adapted to a semester without ensemble-performance opportunities. The program’s director, Gerald Martin Moore, and his students have focused on what they can. Without the usual fall opera scenes programs to prepare for, Yale Opera singers have concentrated on technique and prepared arias for performances that were filmed in Morse Recital Hall and were broadcast online in December. That “gave them all a boost,” Moore said. “The year is not a complete write-off,” he said, pointing out that there’s plenty he and his students can do and work on, though the situation is far from ideal. “The ones I feel most sorry for are the ones who (graduated) last year,” Moore said, adding that this moment has also been tough for singers in the Institute of Sacred Music program, who can’t participate in choral activities.
School of Music faculty have felt the loss, regardless of what instrument they play. Brentano String Quartet cellist Nina Lee said the ensemble, which is in residence at YSM and is among the most respected of its time, saw a particularly busy year deleted from her Google calendar. On top of that, Lee had COVID-19, an antibody test confirmed after the fact. “There’s a certain reckoning when you realize that things have been erased,” Lee said of the loss of performance opportunities. For the first month and a half of the pandemic, Lee didn’t play her instrument. “The kind of hope that I saw was very, very far away,” she said. “The last concert I played was March 8,” faculty violinist Ani Kavafian said in October. “Everything got canceled.” Faculty pianist Boris Berman said the same thing: “I haven’t given a single concert” or traveled anywhere since March. Berman, like many of his colleagues on the school’s faculty, are used to balancing responsibilities at YSM with performing around the world. Over the summer—the first he’d spent at home in New Haven in as long as he could remember—Berman occasionally looked at his calendar. “Today, I’m actually in Italy,”
he’d notice. “Tomorrow, I’m supposed to move [on] to Portugal.” Asked how it felt to not perform, Berman said “it felt like somebody who, after a serious injury, was bed-ridden. One longs for a normal activity that has been denied to him. I practice my piano daily, but as a concert performer, I feel out of practice, emotionally.”
Looking at an empty performance calendar himself, faculty guitarist Benjamin Verdery said he too felt “lucky enough to have a job. I didn’t suffer,” he said. A lot of younger musicians were “hit way harder than me.” Berman echoed that sentiment: “I feel fortunate that I teach, because still, I’m making music—in a different way, but I’m making music. But those of my colleagues who don’t teach, it must be very rough for them.” For YSM faculty, the nature of teaching has begun to look different. “My life now as a teacher has really changed from teaching music to being kind of a philosopher,” Kavafian said.
Interviewed by the Yale Daily News in October, pianist Rachel Breen ’22MM expressed some frustration with the limitations imposed by COVID-19. “Being a sonic art, music is particularly difficult to teach and learn over the internet,” Breen told the student newspaper. “Even with teachers making their best effort, musicians simply can’t receive the same quality of education through Zoom.” That doesn’t mean students haven’t faced the challenge head-on. Harpsichordist Jonathan Salamon ’17MM ’23DMA told the Yale Daily News that “the loss of activity and purpose has been harrowing—especially when the pandemic first began, it was very difficult to practice or compose and stay motivated […]. But there is hope. So many musicians have started performing online, offering innovative musical experiences to audiences, all the while keeping themselves busy and engaged.”
Verdery found that moving lessons online yielded some lessons of its own. Beginning last spring, Verdery had his students record videos of themselves playing, and he and they would analyze those performances during lessons. “I think some of them made vast improvements in their playing,” he said. The tape, as they say, doesn’t lie. Nor does the internet replace the real world. But, Kavafian said, “We have to make the best of it.” Of particular importance, she said, is keeping everyone engaged with one another, “because we’re alone right now.” Kavafian is facing the moment with hopefulness. “A new enthusiasm has sprung among all of us,” she said of her faculty colleagues, an enthusiasm fueled in large part by students’ attitudes. Most of the students in the Yale Opera program, for example, have been “very positive and very understanding of the situation,” Moore said. And he is, too, even as the art form itself is largely on hold. “Since I was young, I’ve been hearing that opera is a dying business,” he said. “I do think it will come back,” likely having seen its performance model broadened.
Composer and YSM alumna Caroline Shaw ’07MM is resistant to the idea of a whole new paradigm. “I’m still basically writing for live performers,” she said, “lessinterested” in adapting her work to the online world. That’s not to say the pandemic hasn’t disrupted Shaw’s process, which she described as one that’s usually “tucked into” her life. She’s used to writing wherever she is, while traveling and on planes, as opposed to sitting down at a desk and getting down to work in discreet moments reserved for creativity. Lately, though, that’s much more what her practice has looked like. She’s had to design a new routine and in doing so has noticed that “the energy of the writing period is less condensed.” While she continues to work with an eye toward a familiar future, Shaw understands that the pandemic might fundamentally change how some artists approach and think about their practice.
That exercise reflects a big question: “How will our profession change?” Berman asked rhetorically. “If there are no performances in public,” he said, “some other forms of the creative work for a performer will have to emerge.” For Berman, it’s too soon to have any meaningful answers. That performers can use technology to share their work is of course a good thing, he said, but it’s not clear how audiences will settle into that as the new way to experience “live” performance. Berman also pointed out that “by and large, all these online performances have been offered free of charge,” hinting again at the effect the pandemic has had on musicians’ abilities to make a living. What a career as a performer will look like in the future is unclear, Berman said. Just as it’ll likely be a while before audiences can experience performances of big orchestral works in concert halls, for example, it’ll be a while before soloists can appear with those orchestras. New careerdefining moments will have to emerge, Berman said, “the building of careers will have to be different. I do not know how.” Time, he pointed out, will tell us, as it always has.
Students rehearsing for Yale Philharmonia with principal conductor Peter Oundjian
professor of music history at YSM, pointed to the French Lee said, “I refused to say that this catastrophe can separate Revolution as a moment that’s analogous to the current us.” She began organizing outdoor chamber music readings one. “Technological innovation had already made printed on the sidewalks of Brooklyn, gatherings primarily music cheaper and instruments more widely available designed to give students—from Yale, The Juilliard before the Bastille fell,” Berry said, “and middle-class School, the Manhattan School of Music, or wherever—a consumers were already playing music in the home, but chance to play for passersby and to remind the world that the sudden collapse of traditional systems of courtly they exist. “I can get people connected again,” Lee said she patronage in the wake of the Revolution accelerated those realized. “I can’t tell you how healing it was, in a way that trends and made them I’d never imagined.” The message dominant factors in 19th- to students: “We won’t forget you.” century composition and Those informal performances performance.” In certain also had plenty to offer the ways, Berman said, the passersby who gathered to listen. pandemic has been a “huge “People were crying,” Lee said. equalizer.” Superstars who could command fees “What all of us are finding of tens of thousands of in our own way, is how our dollars, he said, and young chosen profession speaks to artists who’d perform us,” YSM Dean Robert Blocker for a couple of hundred, said. “The good in this is that were suddenly in the it also allows us to look at same boat. As in 1789, others with different eyes.” Berry said, the question is what that boat looks YSM student practices during the fall semester performance block It’s a heavy moment, to be like, and whether it can sure. “There’s definitely float. Moore thinks the pandemic could dissuade a lot of fear,” Shaw said, pointing not only to the some from pursuing a career in performance. uncertain future of an industry but to a moment of racial reckoning and political turmoil. For Shaw, there are some foundational things about how we experience music together that we’ll have Despite there being “a real sense of loss” in the music to find a way back to—because it’s important. “I’m community, Shifrin said, “everybody does have the writing music now toward that moment,” she sense that this is not forever.” Moore agreed, saying, said. “I really believe in in-person music-making.” “People are aware that this will eventually end.” That resonated with Lee, who found something anew in “It’s not the end of music-making,” Verdery pointed out. herself during the pandemic. “My best version of myself is when I’m creating something” or experiencing the creation “It is music-making,” Blocker added, “that the of something, she said. A few months into the lockdown, world turns to for reassurance, for hope.” q
