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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

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