If ever a musical occasion mattered more than the music itself, here it was. Social distancing meant the hall could not be completely full on Tuesday afternoon for the London Symphony Orchestra’s post-pandemic return. But the mere public address announcement “Welcome back to the Barbican Hall” drew loud and prolonged cheering from the LSO’s first audience in 14 months, as well as answering applause and waving from the players themselves. For everyone, it was good to be back.
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Both the Elbphilharmonie and the Laeiszhalle will reopen on 31 May in light of falling Covid numbers.
Audience members will have to show proof of vaccination, or a recent negative Covid test, or proof of their recovery from the virus.
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A fascinating article on how musical instruments get made with clips from YouTube:
Some scholars argue that bone and ivory flutes are the very earliest of tonal musical instruments, with examples from as long as 43,000 years ago. The videos in this show the making of a simple end-blown kaval, a Baroque flute, modern flute, clarinet, and bassoon. You’ll note that the process of whittling a few holes in a hollow bone or stick has evolved dramatically over the years. Finally, as every double-reed player knows, reed-making is an essential skill, but few of us have seen the process from start to finish. Here's a glimpse.
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And for the pessimists among us: Stages of Grief: What the pandemic has done to the arts
It doesn’t take a Leonardo-level intellect to figure out that the pandemic has been devastating for the arts economy. Live events were the first things to stop, and they will be the last to return. That means musicians, actors, and dancers, plus all the people who enable them to take the stage—playwrights and choreographers, directors and conductors, lighting designers and makeup artists, roadies, ushers, ticket takers, theater managers—have no way to make a living from their work, and haven’t for more than a year.
Still, I don’t think most of us appreciate just how bad things are. The crisis goes well beyond the performing arts. Surveys published last summer found that 90 percent of independent music venues were in danger of closing for good, but so were a third of museums. In a survey by the Music Workers Alliance, 71 percent of musicians and DJs reported a loss of income of at least 75 percent, and in another, by the Authors Guild, 60 percent of respondents reported losing income, with an average drop of 43 percent. During the third quarter of 2020, unemployment averaged 27 percent among musicians, 52 percent among actors, and 55 percent among dancers. In the first two months of the pandemic, unemployment in the film and sound-recording industries reached 31 percent. Meanwhile, as of September, gallery sales of modern and contemporary art were down by 36 percent. What has been happening across the arts is not a recession. It is not even a depression. It is a catastrophe.
There is a lot more in the article, so I recommend reading the whole thing.
In 1982, the top 1 percent of musicians earned 26 percent of concert revenue. By 2017, the top 1 percent earned 60 percent. And so it is across the arts: the bestseller lists are dominated by a shrinking number of authors and books; the box office, by an endless procession of big-budget, mega-grossing franchises. And in the visual-art world, as of 2018, just twenty individuals accounted for 64 percent of global sales by living artists. Aside from stars and superstars, nearly everyone is making do with less.
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For our envoi, here is Simon Rattle conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in the Symphony No. 9 by Anton Bruckner:
I finished Deresiewicz's The Death of the Artist this week. It's gloomy. Cumulatively it makes a case that the markets are so spectacularly over-saturated that the idea of making it professionally in the arts was/is probably a complete waste of time on the one hand but that, on the other hand, that vocational art is and should still be different from amateur activity. It's something of a paradoxical double-bind in some ways.
ReplyDeleteThing couldn't be better for the arts for amateurs in terms of access to tools and channels through which to create and disseminate work, but times could probably not be much worse for being able to monetize it yourself, as distinct from the platforms monetizing your work is the gist of WD's book.
Jordan Peterson has remarked that the problem for creative people is that it is extremely difficult to monetize creativity. And getting harder!
ReplyDeletePatents and copyrights can only hold back diffusion of human creativity in brief and incomplete ways. Note also the arts are not the only economic sector devastated by the pandemic and the shutdowns in response. Restaurants and their relatively underpaid workforce have also suffered tremendously.
ReplyDeleteYes, enormous and widespread effects throughout society.
ReplyDeleteThank you Bryan, as always many wonderful things ...
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