Volume 26 Issue 1 - September 2020

REAR VIEW
MIRROR
COVID’s
Metamorphoses
ROBERT HARRIS
I
think it’s becoming clear that, at least here in
North America, the unimaginable is going
to be a reality.
There just aren’t going to be any major live performing arts events
for us to go to for a year. Maybe longer. The Toronto Symphony has
cancelled its entire planned season; Music Toronto the same. The COC
has cancelled its productions at least until January, as has the National
Ballet. No Nutcracker in Toronto for the first time since 1955.
But the shade of the pandemic hasn’t just denied us opportunities
to witness performances. Beyond all the artistic and financial
consequences of the virus, three major musical organizations in
Toronto in the midst of institutional renewal have had those plans
severely upended. Gustavo Gimeno will have to wait a year before
he can conduct the TSO as its new music director from the podium
in Roy Thomson Hall. The next general director of the COC, to
replace Alexander Neef in September 2021, might not have a season
to produce for some time, and the fascinating new spirit that Elisa
Citterio has brought to Tafelmusik has been forced into relative hibernation
just as it was blossoming. The virus burrows deeper and deeper
into our lives as it continues unabated.
And so it is becoming clearer that the long-term effects of the disease
are taking on increasingly radical proportions. We have underestimated
the significance of the pandemic repeatedly since it first made
its appearance. We continue to do so, and I shudder to think what will
happen when a second wave of the virus comes smack up against our
regular flu season. With each passing day, the potential for the virus to
seriously disrupt and change central aspects of our lives increases. We’re
not going back to normal, I think. That normal is a thing of the past.
So what might that mean for classical music?
Potentially a great deal. We have forgotten through numb repetition
that the conventions of classical music we adhere to and revere
are more or less arbitrary: that they have changed over the centuries
a great deal, and are always a response to relatively mundane conditions
surrounding music’s performance spaces, audience composition,
economics – the complete day-to-day enterprise of getting it
made. A pretty cogent argument can be advanced that the symphonic
and operatic music we love and cherish today, mainly that of the late
18th and 19th centuries, was created because of an increase in size of
performing venues, an increase in size which was itself a response
to the changing economics of classical music and the need for larger
middle-class audiences to replace disappearing aristocratic patrons.
This in turn led to new instruments of increased volume, new techniques
of playing (to impress other than the cognoscenti) eventually
new forms of composition. It’s a complicated and subtle chain, but a
very real one, even it if flies in the face of our Romantic ideas about
genius and inspiration. Form follows function, as they say. Or, to be
Marxist about it – the means of production of music, based on the
economics of the production of music, create the music itself. Not the
other way around.
So, with that in mind, what happens if the ramifications of
COVID-19 create another revolution in the way we listen to and
pay for classical art, not just for a season or two, but forever. What
happens if those palaces of music – our symphony halls and opera
theatres, with their 2,000 closely packed seats and relatively small
lobbies, become complete white elephants? How will we pay for our
symphonic and operatic art? And what kind of art will we need if the
spaces where it is performed become more intimate, and the expected
price to pay for access to those spaces substantially higher? What do
we perform? What do we write? What instruments do we need for
these conditions; what instruments no longer work? What techniques
Form follows function, as they say. Or, to be
Marxist about it – the means of production
of music, based on the economics of the
production of music, create the music itself.
Not the other way around.
do we teach students to play them?
And more significantly, what role will the music play in society altogether?
Although we are losing the power of this trope as we march
through the 21st century, it’s clear that classical music in the 19th and
20th centuries, was the music most emblematic of the rising bourgeoisie,
the middle class. For that class, classical music was presented
as an all-encompassing, powerful art form, symbolized by opera and
the symphony orchestra (both of which were extremely populist in the
late 19th century) that was intended to provide a highest-commondenominator
unifying aspect to society. And that identification of
classical music with the middle class continued right through to the
invention of mass 20th-century technologies.
We forget now (if we ever knew it) that classical music was right at
the heart of the emerging populist recording and radio industries in
the first decades of the 20th century. The first million-selling record
58 | September 2020 thewholenote.com