Volume 27 Issue 4 - February 2022
Gould's Wall -- Philip Akin's "breadcrumb trail; orchestras buying into hope; silver linings to the music theatre lockdown blues; Charlotte Siegel's watershed moments; Deep Wireless at 20; and guess who is Back in Focus. All this and more, now online for your reading pleasure.
Gould's Wall -- Philip Akin's "breadcrumb trail; orchestras buying into hope; silver linings to the music theatre lockdown blues; Charlotte Siegel's watershed moments; Deep Wireless at 20; and guess who is Back in Focus. All this and more, now online for your reading pleasure.
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REAR VIEW<br />
MIRROR<br />
Signing<br />
Up For<br />
Variant Nu<br />
ROBERT HARRIS<br />
“I am Omicron-sidelined, but mending. But if I<br />
had known they were going to run this pandemic<br />
using the Greek alphabet, I’d have signed up for<br />
Nu? instead.”<br />
A friend of mine who has just come down with COVID emailed<br />
me that joke. A Jewish friend I should add, to explain the joke to<br />
those of you who have no reason to know that Nu is not only a letter<br />
of the Greek alphabet still available to name variants after, but<br />
also, in Yiddish, a word that translates roughly to “So?” in English,<br />
and like “So?” can carry all kinds of connotations depending on<br />
whether it is accompanied by a fatalistic shrug or a “so what”<br />
eye-roll.<br />
In this case, the “nu?” would be a statement of communal resignation,<br />
the very best kind. “Nu – I have COVID? Who doesn’t?” In<br />
other words, we’re all in this together.<br />
I admire my friend’s tenacity and good humour, because the rest<br />
of us aren’t making jokes about COVID – we’re just plain fed up<br />
with all of this – tired of talking about, thinking about, reading<br />
about, and living through it. Aren’t we?<br />
The answer is yes, we are. So why, sir, are you writing another<br />
column about it? Why don’t you just leave bad enough alone?<br />
Just this once more, I promise, because I’m beginning to think<br />
something significant has happened in virus-land over the past<br />
few weeks and months, where classical music is concerned, and it’s<br />
worth noting – and deliberating upon. So, please and thank you.<br />
Hitting pause<br />
I might be imagining this, because it’s been a very long time<br />
since I had a cassette player, but I seem to recall that if you were<br />
listening to a cassette tape and put it on pause, and then forgot<br />
about it and just left it that way,<br />
eventually the machine, if it was<br />
a good machine, would turn<br />
itself off, to avoid straining that<br />
pause mechanism and breaking<br />
it. If it wasn’t a good one, it<br />
made for an ugly picture.<br />
That metaphor I think<br />
perfectly captures where we are<br />
as far as the classical scene finds<br />
itself in North America these<br />
days. It’s different in Europe –<br />
they’ve been trucking along,<br />
masked and distanced, for some time in European halls. But here,<br />
with a few exceptions, very few, actually, we’ve basically been<br />
without concert music for two full years, and it’s not over yet. So I<br />
feel as though my finely engineered internal aesthetic mechanism<br />
has kicked in, acting just like that cassette override. What was once<br />
merely a pause is now a full stop. Something that was originally<br />
merely interrupted, ready to pick up again right where it left off,<br />
at a second’s notice, has now ground to a halt and will need to be<br />
begun all over again.<br />
To my way of thinking, that’s a game-changing difference.<br />
In the first place, for many musicians, the interruption in their<br />
performing cycles, in the rhythm and pace of their usual musicmaking,<br />
normally buoyed periodically and repeatedly by exposure<br />
to the living presence of an audience, has left their aesthetic sense<br />
congealed into a tight web of absence. It is one thing to be held<br />
mute and artistically celibate for a short, anxious period of time,<br />
with your instincts still ready and warm. It is something quite<br />
different to feel yourself forgetting the emotional rush of connection<br />
to an audience, a connection that is quite different from your<br />
tie to your instrument or to the music you’re playing.<br />
Those latter two connections might still be intact – you still practice,<br />
you still play, you still create music – but the final rush of<br />
completion (which can only happen when other bodies are brought<br />
into range of the music and it vibrates within them as well as<br />
within yourself) is missing. I worry that musicians, after a while<br />
(to protect themselves from terminal loneliness) will find the sense<br />
of connection has gone from pause to stop. Does hitting “play”<br />
again automatically restart things? Or do they have to be learned<br />
all over again?<br />
60 | <strong>February</strong> <strong>2022</strong> thewholenote.com