It’s May 18, 2020. I filed my Spring grades yesterday, marking the end of the craziest semester that (I hope) any of us will ever experience. So much has happened, and yet in many ways it feels like we’re in the same holding pattern, with no end in sight.
For me, this began for real on March 11, a Wednesday, when my institution (Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY, about a 3 hour drive from New York City) announced that in-person classes would end that week and resume online on March 23, after our spring break. That announcement left the door open to a later return to campus, which was never to be realized. But we didn’t know that then – the general assumption was that we would miss a week or 2 of in-person class, then be right back to normal.
Even so, those last few days of “normal” immediately took on an entirely different tone. My community band, the Catskill Valley Wind Ensemble, met that night for our normal rehearsal at the local high school, where new signs warned visitors not to enter if they had any COVID symptoms. They still allowed us to rehearse, and so we did, with the vast majority of membership present. I remember having the surreal feeling that this would be our last run on this music, even though the board was holding out hope for salvaging our concert date, which seemed almost impossibly far away on May 3. I conducted with a little extra intensity that night, and we made real progress on the music. We decided to rehearse again if the school was still open. But that was that – before the next Wednesday, publics schools had closed their doors as well. We got lucky – no one among us has reported a COVID case yet, while a choir in Washington state (an early hot-spot for COVID) rehearsed on March 10, and most of their members got sick, including 2 deaths.
Back on the Hartwick campus the next morning (Thursday March 12), my usual Brass Methods class took on extra urgency as I realized that each of these students would have to be sent home with 3 instruments, 2 of which they didn’t yet have. We sorted it out, but a class that should have been a fairly ordinary review for their upcoming demo lessons turned into an exercise in logistics. And how were they going to do those demo lessons anyhow?
I returned to my office and was hit by waves of emotion. At this point, I was mostly sad, since I could see all of the semester’s plans beginning to unravel. I sat with that for a while, returning to my two favorite YouTube videos for solace and processing.
This is what I turn to for wringing out stuck feelings:
And this is where I go to experience pure joy:
It was only then that any solutions began to form. I knew I would be seeing both of my ensembles (Brass Ensemble and Wind Ensemble) for the last time that night. We were lucky, as other schools had called for immediate closures. I wanted to make some more memories, so both groups spent a little time outside. Brass Ensemble played some of their favorites from our rep folder, and Wind Ensemble gave a rendition of our alma mater, “Oyaron, Hill of Dreams,” with the soprano soloist who was then scheduled to join us at commencement.
Back inside, we played through some of the music for our Carnegie Hall concert that I already knew we would need to cancel. We officially pulled out the next day, only about 3 days before Carnegie Hall cancelled all events for the spring.
That Friday morning, our last day on campus, students were saying goodbye to each other, and to the faculty, as if we would never be together again. I got surprise hugs. Then everyone was gone.
My family (wife and kids ages 5 and almost 2) attempted to carry on and support local businesses that Saturday. My son and I got haircuts (an amazingly prescient move), we all went to the local farmer’s market, we had lunch at the local brewery, and we had two of our closest friends over for dinner that night. But it was becoming clearer and clearer that none of that would be safe anymore. On Sunday, March 15, we entered lockdown.
I found myself suddenly needing to rethink everything about my teaching while also caring for these two small beings, whose daycare had closed with the public schools. I was also confronted with the loss of so many plans, which would cascade further into the future for the next several weeks. I was extremely fortunate that I had the spring break to process and sort things out. But that was the most intense and frustrating processing period that I’ve ever experienced. Essentially, I was having to reimagine my entire life on short notice while swimming through real and debilitating grief.
I began looking for resources for online teaching and was completely and utterly overwhelmed by the options – I had about the emotional bandwidth for a water fountain, and found myself facing a firehose. I joined, and then left, at least two Facebook groups for online music teaching. Every day, I would come up with a plan, only to abandon it and completely rethink everything later that same day. I once posted on Facebook that I wanted to team up with others to do a Virtual Intercollegiate Band. People were interested, but between about 12 of us, no one had the time or tech to do it properly. I was also aware of several of my own students who no longer had access to their instruments, so I knew that any performing assignments I gave were not even possible for about 20% of my band. After much personal back and forth (and no shortage of frustration and tears), I settled on the following format:
Each week, I introduced the Wind Ensemble to the week’s topics via the “Tuesday Video.” I would play our weekly warmups there on my trumpet, and talk through anything else that was going on, including one performance assignment (usually done through Smartmusic) and one “academic” assignment. These varied from listening and responding to podcasts to filling surveys, all involving music. Then on Thursday (mirroring our usual Tuesday/Thursday rehearsal schedule), we met on Zoom. The first of these showed me just how completely inadequate Zoom is for music. I had to scrap plans to do a non-metric, improvisatory piece over Zoom immediately. The best we could ever do is have one person play as a reference while everyone else played on mute.
The second rehearsal was on my birthday. The students were aware, so they attempted to play “Happy Birthday” for me. This was hilarious, in that they hadn’t yet fully absorbed the awfulness of Zoom, and most of them couldn’t actually play “Happy Birthday” without music. So in subsequent weeks, we started learning one tune by ear during the rehearsals, an exercise that allowed us to hone some musical skills and stay in touch with our instruments. Otherwise, we would mostly spend these rehearsals chatting and catching up on life. I referred to it as group therapy.
All of this was optional for students, since we no longer had the structures of the campus to hold things in place, nor the solid internet that so many of us take for granted. I would typically have 75% or more of the students at the rehearsals, and about 50% would turn in either the performance or academic assignments. The Brass Ensemble was assigned self-duets from the Arban book, to be recorded via BandLab. I recorded one myself every week (they got progressively weirder), but didn’t get a single one from any student.
Between my classes, I tried to soldier on as usual. In what little work time I had, I tried to catch up on watching my conducting videos. I usually watch these and groan, since (like every conductor) I never like how I look. This time was different. Our concert had just happened on March 5, when coronavirus was in nearly everyone’s vocabulary, but not perceived to be an immediate threat. Rather than groan, I cried and cried. The caliber of my performance was no different, but seeing myself at it again, and hearing my students in all their humanity, set off an emotional bomb. I realized just how much I missed band, on a primal, subconscious level, and how I didn’t (and still don’t) know when I’ll get to do anything like that again. Later that same week, I cried just thinking about the Holst First Suite.
Meanwhile, I was also reading the news, and the handful of research and opinion articles related to music that were being shared on Facebook. None of it was good. For weeks, any time I read remotely bad news, I entered an emotional spiral of denial then further grief. I climbed out of this sometime around week 6 (so, the end of April). There was no specific event that changed anything, just the passage of time and the slow acceptance of a whole lot of new realities. Since then, I’ve kept an ever-growing reading list of the articles that seem to most pertain to this profession of ours. Maybe it will help me help others chart a way forward, and maybe it’s entirely out of my control. I don’t know.
Two of the assignments for Wind Ensemble were “required,” meaning that I strongly encouraged participation, but wouldn’t actually hold it against them if they couldn’t turn something in. In a typical semester, each student plays an exit audition in which they play something from our repertoire. This time around, I asked them each to play or share something that gave them comfort in these trying times. The responses varied widely, from Mozart to metal and lots in between, and some students played them “live” for us on a Zoom rehearsal. (I shared my comfort videos above as examples when explaining the project).
I also “required” their participation in our version of John Cage’s 4’33”. This was one of my early ideas – I knew it was a performance activity that we could easily do with or without instruments. I only settled on the exact format of it less than 3 days out, as I was still in the tail end of re-thinking mode. On Monday, April 20, the day we would have performed at Carnegie Hall, I held a Facebook Live event at 8pm. After a brief explanation, I led a synchronous recording of 4’33” for whoever was watching. Thus, each person recorded their own 4 and a half minutes of “silence” (it’s really background sound) wherever they were, all at the same time. I used the Voice Memos app on my iPhone, and I encouraged others to do the same. They sent their recordings to me, and I overlaid them in iMovie (with a retrospective slide show), creating a composite soundscape representing all of us, in all of our different place, but at the same time. Here’s how it came out.
I had only ever conceived of 4’33” as a joke before this. It may have bound us together more significantly than anything else we did this semester.
6 days before our final rehearsal, I realized I wanted to do something very special for the seniors. By this point, even public schools were cancelled for the year, and summer and even fall plans were starting to melt away. Our commencement had long since been moved to September, and thus our seniors were approaching a milestone without a marker. On top of that, this class was the one I entered Hartwick with, so I will always feel a special connection with them. It occurred to me (belatedly, as usual) that I could likely get a lot of our guests and alumni over the last 4 years to pop in for a quick Zoom call. So that’s what we did: I invited each of them to give some brief words of congratulations, then we all learned the melody from Pomp and Circumstance by ear. The best part was the students didn’t know that any of this would happen! It was as magical a Zoom experience as anyone’s likely to have:
Maybe that experience is what got me past the grief. I’m not sure, because I still dive into it with some regularity. I cried watching recorded student recitals with canned accompaniment a couple of days ago, and I am certainly more raw than usual to any ensemble music. But I’m also the realist (aka Debbie Downer) in meetings, talking with a straight face about how we will be happier if we let go of all preconceptions about what fall will be like. This semester has been a giant lesson in disappointment and resilience for me. The thing that made it bearable at all was the ability to keep any connection to the people in my band, and that’s what I will cling to going forward. We have to remember that in band, we create a community that means a lot to a lot of people. We should do everything we can do to preserve that in this dark, silent, lonely time.