The International Corona 19 Music Festival

Welcome to the International Corona 19 Music Festival!

It is hosted by this blog, Musical Assumptions, where all sorts of discourse, musical and sometimes otherwise, runs and flies freely. Participation is also free. And you can dip in whenever you want, pretty much undetected (though the watchful eye of my statcounter lets me know from where you came, and what pages you seemed interested in).

Here are the highlights of the festival, which began its Spring Season in March, without any preparation:

In March musicians in isolation played a lot of Bach. Solo Bach, mostly. The prelude of the G major Cello Suite was being performed by violists and cellists everywhere for a virtual audience of YouTube eyes and ears. If there were movements from other Suites being played online during March, I must have missed them. I also heard a lot of solo Bach being played on the violin. People did clever and beautiful things with solo Bach, like breaking up the Chaconne into four-measure units and creating a virtual (and otherwise impossible) performance of the whole piece. There was comaraderie in solo Bach.

And then there was "Amazing Grace," which had many really meaningful and heartfelt performances in March, and has had more painful and poignant moments in the Summer Season.

I spent my Spring Season playing Bach too, but it wasn't anything new for me. I had been doing the daily solo Bach circuit for decades. And after a few too many exclusive loops around the Cello Suites and Violin Sonatas and Partitas fishtank, I started to diversify with etudes (writing some of my own), Telemann Fantasies, and highlights of the violin repertoire. I also started practicing the first violin parts of the Beethoven Quartets, and, thanks to my vast collection of Beethoven Quartet CDs, the IMSLP (which offers full recordings for members), and YouTube, I can play along with scores of different excellent recordings.

Midway into the Spring Season, "Lift Every Voice" came out of the mouths and instruments of musicians in isolation, particularly Musicians of Color who started speaking (and playing) out about the omnipresence of racism in the classical musical community as well as in the larger community of humanity, particularly in the United States, and particularly at this time.

In the first few weeks of the Spring Season people began using video editing programs to make multi-track recordings of themselves. The technology had been around for a while, but suddenly musicians began really exploring it and exploiting its possibilities. They started subscribing to the Acapella app, which makes assembly easy, and started investing their savings in better audio equipment. And people (like me) who were not keen on teaching lessons online, started doing all their teaching through their screens.

By the end of May (which I will call the start of the Summer Season, because I can) people who follow trends in the things that classical music institutions are doing realized (finally) that Black composers were terribly underrepresented in what has become known as the musical canon. The strides musicologically-minded musicians made in the pre-Corona months of 2020 to include more music written by women in the programs that would be performed by major orchestras were strong enough to get people interested in composers like Florence Price. Actually, we don't know of any other composers like Florence Price, but I do imagine there were many. They just didn't get the (small amount of) attention that Price got during her lifetime.

I knew about Price because of a 1995 article by Rae Linda Brown about her in the Maud Powell Signature When I saw that her “Adoration” was in the IMSLP, I immediately set to work on a transcription for violin or viola and piano. It was a very easy transcription to make. Now, thanks to the helpful promotion of the transcription by Augustin Hadelich (the honorary guest artist of this festival), it looks like "Adoration" will play a part in future seasons of the Festival, and beyond.

There have been several panel discussions online (preserved as Zoom discussions) about the present and future state of music. There have also been several panel discussions inside my house, and inside my head. Today's discussion inside my head (while removing dust and grime from the downstairs floor) concerned an old topic: musical engagement.

Yesterday, after practicing some Beethoven and enjoying the way he wrote in a way that really stimulates creative expression, I had the sudden urge to play Schumann. The optimism and exuberance of Beethoven's Opus 18 didn't suit the moment, though. Only Schumann would do. And then I understood that when Schumann was writing his music to express musical thoughts and feelings that he had, he was doing it so that other people could have the same kind of vehicle for expression that he had. Once a piece is written, and all the notes, rests, dynamics, expression marks, and phrasings are in their places, it is a vehicle for expression that can be used by anyone to express what otherwise cannot or could not be expressed.

And in the case of Schumann, who could not perform his music because of the physical injuries that made it impossible to do so, it was even more important to write for other people to express themselves. And it is really all about the music, and not about Schumann. It's what Schumann gave to others that mattered during his lifetime and matters now.

When I think about what kind of a musician/person I want to be (or have found myself becoming), I like to imagine that my work is providing a way for people to express themselves. Once a piece of music is written it is no longer the responsibility or the property of the composer. It is the "charge" of the person or people playing it to fill it with their life, breath, and movement. And that way those feelings, that life, that breath, and that movement, can be shared with people who listen.

People who listen respond on many levels. People who play have the responsibility to make the listening experience a comfortable one for the listener by playing in tune and in rhythm, and feeling physically comfortable while playing. And they have the responsibility to make it a meaningful one by paying attention to the structures and balances in the music, the possible ways that words in a song can be understood, and the sense of connection and dedication they have to the musical line itself.

Now I'll go back to normal bloggery, but I will return with a report on future seasons of the International Corona 19 Music Festival.