Thoughts on What May Be Ahead for Artists and the Performing Arts

COLLAB CORNER

Today is a lovely late April day, one of few sunny and warm days this month. Normally I would have taken a walk on such a morning, but this column was calling me, and my thoughts have for some time anyway been of September, when this column will appear, rather than of spring. What will early fall be like? Many of us will begin a new academic year, open our teaching studios after summer, and begin the concert and opera performance season anew. Will it seem strange or even frightening to experience these beloved activities more in person than on Zoom? Will we be more in person than on Zoom? Will we cringe at the thought of going inside a concert hall? We have longed so much for the return of normality that surely we are eager to be, as my dear colleague, soprano Barbara Kierig used to say, "up close and personal." But the pandemic is very much still with us, and I wonder if some will be afraid, maybe too afraid to return to nearly normal ways of making and teaching music by September. And of course, I know many of you have simply been getting on with the work for many months. I applaud you. But some may yet be hesitant to step out of sequestered existences, even still masked, distanced, and with other precautions and restrictions in place. More than a few of us have discovered how much we like being home, going to work by merely walking into another room, away from airports, public transportation, and even our own cars. Others say their students have made such great and important strides as singers and pianists in what in September will be 19 months of Covid, that they are determined to forge ahead. Many tell me they want to blend their teaching methods to routinely include online lessons from now on. It appears that some issues are better addressed online! Hopefully September will bring a determination from each of us to act as we believe necessary in order to feel safe while teaching, attending, or performing. If that means we attend concerts online, we have experience now that assures us it can work. I hope more concerts and operas will be presented live and online. I hope operas and orchestras will present both to a socially distanced audience inside and on huge screens outdoors when weather permits, or when a hearty audience with warm winter clothes permit. (I once attended an outdoor operatic gala in February in Oslo, and adored the performances, the natural beauty, and the experience.) We need to work toward developing a culture that routinely presents options for listening and viewing. I look forward to much more of the bold creativity we have seen develop during Covid: many ways of presenting online concerts, imaginative creation designed for outdoor venues, and many superb online conversations about music from leading international performers and scholars, musicians, poets, composers, etc. I often have felt as if I were blessedly back in school, taking in so much about music and music performance for the first time. This online life saved many of us, didn't it? Everyone seemed more intense, more dedicated than ever to their art, perhaps even a bit desperate, to find a way to be seen and heard or a way to see and hear. In the hands of the most brilliant, creative technicians and musicians, technology has quite taken on a persona! Why in the world would we abandon any of this? Our performance possibilities, not to mention the new possibilities for composition, just grew many fold and can long continue to give us an emotional shot in the arm—to pair with the real one I hope you already received.

So, despite some personal reticence, I feel optimistic and excited for what I hope will be around the corner for artists and the performing arts. None of us will live long enough to forget the unbelievably large numbers of those lost or the threat Covid has brought to almost every facet...