Chamber music during COVID: a logistical challenge with spontaneous rewards
It began with an email. “Well, the weather is glorious–see you at the tent at 5:30!.” What was supposed to be a normal Friday rehearsal in Lincoln Hall transformed into a concert thrown together last-minute by our octet coach. 8 musicians were not what innocent passersby of the arts quad were planning to see.
The tent? At our first rehearsal three weeks ago, I was sure that one of the following two scenarios would define the fate of our chamber music group: 1. We get through this first meeting and the school shuts down all in-person gatherings the following week, or 2. We don’t get shut down, but we continue rehearsing aimlessly without the traditional semester-end chamber concert to look forward to. So, when news arrived (granted at the latest possible moment) of this rehearsal-concert hybrid, I was euphoric. The weather gods had gifted us 82 ֯F weather that Friday to play a socially-distant outdoor concert.
Much like the case of the pandemic, however, chaos ensued. Nothing about this concert was extravagant in any way. In fact, it was as far as it could be from refined.
I had imagined walking into the tent with my fellow musicians, sitting down, and playing seamlessly through the first movement. But instead, we found ourselves scrambling to secure our sheet music on the wobbling stands with masking tape amidst the aggressive flapping of the canopy tent in the unanticipated wind.
Insert intermission here. Those first twenty brutal minutes of logistical triaging called for a necessary contingency plan.
Like any musical group, we wanted to execute our piece to perfection. So as per our coach’s request, we ran through parts of the development and recapitulation to recalibrate. That process didn’t work too well though. With our socially-distant seating arrangement and lack of walls, we might as well have been playing in individual soundproof rooms. Then came the point of the dreaded synchronous, or so they were supposed to be, sixteenth notes. I do not exaggerate when I say that this segment has always been the ultimate test of our octet’s musical chemistry, so when a passionate gust of wind knocked over one cellist’s stand and jeopardized the already precarious tape holding all the music together, I was bracing for a crash landing. Sure, a couple violins and violas dropped out of the race here and there, but that one persevering communal brain cell we shared that somehow allowed us to reconvene at that last chord was an accomplishment, to say the least.
I do not doubt the fact that Mendelssohn was most likely rolling in his grave hearing the harmonic discord of our performance. But given the fact that Mendelssohn was only 16 when he composed this universally celebrated work, I’d like to believe that he would have appreciated the youthful mayhem of our concert. The piece features extremes in fortes and pianos and the umpteen use of hairpins throughout, mimicking the bipolar weather throwing us, quite literally, around. Mendelssohn meant for the octet to be full of “youthful verve, brilliance, and perfection,” as music critic Conrad Wilson describes. We blundered on the last requirement but definitely exceeded all expectations on the first.
This glorious mess of a concert was not destined to be ordinary, and I wouldn’t have liked it any other way. When would I ever get the chance again to play the Mendelssohn Octet in E-Flat with this same group of musicians in the middle of a pandemic wearing masks seated six feet apart (more or less) under a tent in the Cornell arts quad with dogs playing fetch and four different games of spike ball happening simultaneously?