I’m an impatient person by nature. I hate being told to wait, to breathe deeply, to meditate on the moment. You say wait, I say why? To those who have taken the time for measured artistic responses to the cosmic crap storm this pandemic has wrought, I salute you, even as I acknowledge my inability to be so restrained. “Get busy living or get busy dying.” If it’s good enough for Morgan Freeman, it’s good enough for me.

As Plato said, necessity really is the mother of invention, and what a mother of a situation we have right now in the performing arts. The pandemic has ruptured the careful branding that arts organizations have cultivated, turning strengths into vulnerabilities amongst institutions that had every reason to believe the status quo would provide time for a manageable evolution into the digital age.

The very idea of music as a profession is changing in front of our eyes. As institutions do what they have to in order to weather the storm, players will have to do the same. The creative impulse will manifest itself in backyard concerts, drive-in operas, more YouTube videos of solo Bach and multi-layered children choruses, and God only knows what else. To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, “Music will find a way.”

Just like restaurants are pivoting to delivery service in order to survive, orchestras and chamber music presenters are being given a hard shove down the digital path. Musicians are in a mad dash to set up home broadcasting studios, reflecting a new reality in our profession that none of us old farts could have foreseen in the conservatories.

Ray Bradbury once wrote that “Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art,” a lesson I sincerely hope that we all learn from this experience, both individually and organizationally. The pre-pandemic artistic identities we’ve clung to have been ripped out of our arms, forcing us to choose between taking more risks or doing nothing.

I’ve felt all along that there is an opportunity here to re-imagine what concerts can be. If the institutions have to go into survival mode, then let’s take the basket of ingredients we’ve been given and create the best meal possible!

For 45^th Parallel Universe, we’ve been incredibly fortunate to have amazing friends like Danny Rosenberg, who designed the technology (we call it “Kevin”) that allows us to collaborate with artists all over the world, providing connection in a time of isolation, and a paid gig in a time of shuttered concert halls. Nothing will replace hearing live music, but Kevin gets us as close as we can for now.

Our players are reconnecting with old friends, making music together again, and our growing online audiences are showing their generous support. Our experiment is just our way of answering the challenge of the moment, one of many interesting experiments that are happening in our artistic ecosystem.

Impatiently yours…

Ron Blessinger
Executive Director, 45^th Parallel Universe