Only Connect - lessons from the current crisis and the consolation of Mozart

By Dan Harding

At the Vitual Music Project University of Kent 

As this series for the Beach Creative blog charting the progress of the Virtual Music Project draws to a close (although the project itself will continue), it’s an opportunity for me to reflect on what’s transpired. The process of building pieces of repertoire in unusual fashion, forced upon us by lockdown, has necessitated a different way of working in response, and thrown up some questions not just about the process, but about wider issues too.

Is the online musical project a suitable replacement for the real thing ?

Absolutely not. Musicians need to work – to rehearse and perform – with others, in order for the shared electricity generated by collaborative working to inform the finished performance. The indefinable magic that comes from shared rehearsing and concert-giving can’t be re-created in the online environment. But it does offer a means to continue making music, albeit in a vastly different way.

Connecting is vital

The one constant aspect of the emails and messages filling up my Inbox as the recordings have been arriving is the use of the word ‘connected.’ Variations on a theme – ‘thanks for helping me stay connected;’ ‘it’s great to feel connected to Canterbury;’ ‘it’s a lovely way to still feel connected with others.’ Continuing to make music – albeit in a drastically altered form – has provided a much-needed element of continuity for people, and a way of keeping in touch during lockdown and enforced separation from family and friends.

Whilst people are making art in solitary situations, the ability to feel that what they are producing is part of a larger context has been an important aspect of their creativity. Online art exhibitions, virtual tours, online ‘Meet the Artist’ sessions; it’s not simply been about producing art in isolation, it’s also been about finding different, new ways in which to share it, to make it available. Livestreamed concerts from people’s living-rooms have shown that artists need to feel their work is reaching people, that what they have to say is reaching those who are willing to see and hear it

We need the arts

The arts has been a real lifeline for people’s mental health and wellbeing under lockdown. We’ve seen the surge in people watching online performances from theatres, concert-halls, living-rooms, kitchens as artists move online to keep engaged with audiences. We’ve been watching films and bingeing on boxed sets on Netflix and Amazon Prime; we’ve been reading books. Art educates, informs, entertains, distracts, poses questions, challenges, reassures – and we need it to keep doing all those things even in a time of great uncertainty.

 We’re all coping in the best way we can
 Reading the other stories on this blog too, one sees various threads running through all the different responses to the current situation. Veronica’s act (and how telling it is) of rebuilding a 1940s doll’s house; Sylvia’s transformation into a  bird- and weather-watcher who tidies her bookshelves; Bryan’s turning away from the outside world yet connecting with it still in his explorations in photo-realistic landscape painting; all our stories here concern rebuilding, changing, or even simply coping – and they are all valid. As one of my students, a former History student now working in York Theatre Royal, wrote recently – ‘There’s no correct way to be creative in a crisis.’ And she’s right. The act of being creative, in whatever form, is a valid response in itself, in whatever shape it manifests.

Has there been an increase in nostalgia too, as people look to familiar things, routines, memories for reassurance? I’ve certainly found myself listening to a lot more music that I was listening to when growing up (some of which I’m too embarrassed to mention here…!), and returning to re-read books I haven’t read for many years.

So the last extract with which to leave you, Gentle Reader, is a strings-instrument mix from Mozart’s anthem ‘Ave verum corpus,’ one of his best-loved works, that we are putting together for an online virtual performance next week. Listening to the warmth of the accompaniment which unfolds beneath the voices, it’s difficult not to be moved by hearing musicians overcome the situations in which they find themselves in order to continue, somehow, to make music together.

https://soundcloud.com/daniel-harding-90933651/mozart-aveverum-corpus-strings-only-mix

Music reaches out not only across distance, but across time as well. Mozart’s music speaks to us across the centuries, and reassures us, in its continuing familiarity, that there is the possibility of renewal. The quiet authority of Mozart's message, written in the last year of his tragically short life, rings through the years with its message of consolation. There is hope, it seems to say. I’m looking forward to the time when theatres, libraries, galleries and concert-halls can throw open their doors once more; when we can return to places like Beach Creative, and experience the wonder, the magic and the excitement of the unknown that the arts offer us, time and time again.