As galleries and museums, churches, opera houses and concert halls around the world remain shuttered for months in the effort to slow the spread of COVID-19 there has been nonetheless an explosion of art, music, dance, theatre and every conceivable combination thereof – and all of it is on our screens.

Our screens have brought us art (and its sometimes less respectable relative, ‘entertainment’) since their inception. Indeed beyond movies and TV, born in the bosom of the video screen, the proliferation of computer, Internet and mobile device has meant a steady migration of art with a perfectly respectable ‘real life’ into our projection theatres, our homes, our cars and even our pockets. Predictions of screens causing the inevitable demise of live performance, live gallery-hopping and theatre-going in the face of the ease and economy of home consumption, like the similar accusation leveled at recordings in their time, have appeared exaggerated and even quaint – perhaps until right now.

COVID-19 is endlessly compared to past larger, global-scale pandemics, and though indeed there are virological, epidemiological, and economic similarities to be drawn with the Spanish Flu and even the Black Death it stands alone in outbreaks of its scale and penetration in having emerged in the modern world of media. No aspect of our professional, political, social and personal lives stood untouched by media before 2019’s novel coronavirus, and none could expect to survive a major disruption unchanged by the impact on those media.

What ‘happens’ to art when it is placed in the box? Borrowing an aspect of the virus that has lately placed it there for many of us and despite its decades-long path, it is still inherently novel. To those of us who love art, and indeed also those for whom it is a curiosity, we feel well that distant and costly works of genius, skill and inspiration can be shared so simply and inexpensively in our lives, especially while darkened by confinement, fear and suffering.

Yet we understand that transmission of an art work, as in René Magritte’s most famous painting, is not the work itself, it is a representation of the work mediated by the act and mode of transmission. Self-evident in visual art this is no less true of music, especially so often stored and shared through the skeletal mp3 audio file format.

It may mostly be understood that art shared electronically is not like ‘seeing/hearing it live’, as we apologists for live art love to point out – but for many is it nonetheless ‘good enough’? In The McDonaldization of Society (1993), sociologist George Ritzer suggests that in the latter part of the 20th century the socially-structured form of the fast-food restaurant became the organizational force representing and extending the process of rationalisation into the realm of everyday interaction and individual identity. Ritzer was commenting mostly on us and our society, but I ask, is not also necessarily in evidence in our relationship with art?

Like many of my colleagues I have been active during quarantine in the production and diffusion of music and media intended to fill an acknowledged vacuum, but I am occasionally troubled by wondering how long that vacuum will persist, filled with increasing competence and success through the miracle of technology. Whenever ‘normal’ returns, might we find our art remains comfortably, cheaply and eternally ‘in the box’?

-CD

We of sufficient privilege in the wealthy west to be confined to our homes and Internet connections have turned resoundingly, if perhaps not exclusively, to social media for entertainment and edification during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the positive side of this sometimes mind-dulling and catastrophically time-consuming pursuit is a particularly interesting instance of sharing that has bubbled up among musicians and music-lovers alike, the 10 Albums 10 Days Challenge.

Though it appears to have had a recent upsurge the 10 Albums 10 Days Challenge is not new to COVID-tide, in fact it was well-established on Facebook at least a year ago. In it, those accepting the challenge post a record album of personal or professional significance (in my age-range these are mainly vinyl and CD) every day for 10 days, inviting a new person to take on the challenge themselves each day as well. One should always be wary of these vaguely pyramid-shaped serial information solicitations on Facebook, as they often are used to harvest information on our tastes, history, biases etc. for uses that range from the commercial to the more nefarious. But revealing our love and allegiance to mostly out-of-print albums we mostly already own seems safe enough – and to we music-types it is DARNED interesting.

Full disclosure: I have been invited to take the challenge several times, but have not yet picked up the gauntlet (although I have included a track above from one such soundtrack of my young musicianship, courtesy perhaps of my Dad, always intrigued by the whole sphere of Bach transcription, and my Mom, who quite loved to play this particular record over and over). I’m not resisting 10-10 on principle: I find myself busy these days, and somehow feel the selection merits some careful thought. On the contrary I find the prospect very interesting: the named choices amuse, intrigue and expand my understanding of whoever posted them. But since around the time I coined and adopted the term ‘metatheory’ to describe my habitual outlook, I try always to take to heart one of my favourite quotations:

“When a thing is funny, search it carefully for hidden meaning.”

– George Bernard Shaw

SO, what is inherent to this exercise? Back to basics – music, the purpose the challenge exists, and the force that has worked upon each one of us to create our experiences, our likes and dislikes, sometimes our political and social leanings and for artists, our muse.

Second, it relies on not just music, but recorded music, invented in the late 19th century and risen to formidable cultural force, identity-obsession and industrial cash-cow in the 20th. We are the first few generations to be able to take this challenge: it simply didn’t exist to help form our musical selves until just over a century ago, and unlike live music, it shows no sign of going away.

Another assumption in the 10-10 Challenge is the album itself, a concept that has become much murkier in the the newer era of streaming, downloading and playlists. It was full albums that we saved for and browsed through unheard in the record stores, that we tirelessly transferred to our Walkman tapes, that we played end-to-end repeatedly into scratched oblivion or… whatever other strange afterlife old CDs reached.

Another, especially in the case of vinyl: album art. 10-10 challengers post the sometimes beautiful, always memorable covers from the albums they cite. These visual markers were at least as much a part of the cultural commodity, to say nothing of a critical piece in the marketing/shopping puzzle of live stores as the only way to obtain the product.

Hand-in-hand with the idea of the album is a sometimes narrative, sometimes conceptual, sometimes stylistic, but always somehow uniting paradigm that made songs of an album belong together – and often in a carefully determined order of playing. This paradigm is far from disappeared from the industry culture of hit singles, format radio and online recommendations – but again, it has certainly retreated.

But here’s the most striking thing to me – the 10-10 Challenge is about ME; about the whole idea that the music we like and listen to somehow shapes us. This is intuitive enough in the case of those of us who actually play, sing, conduct, compose and generally encourage music-making – but it is undeniably also true in Challengers who claim no musical talent or activity. Some 10-10 Challengers insist there be no explanation or documentation of each choice – usually just the album cover to convey its thousand theoretical words to the interested viewer. But many other Challengers go into remarkable apologia of what precisely a given album did to form or influence them, or even share touching remembrances of periods or events in their lives that connect therewith by association. And always there is the undertow of gratitude at being nominated for the challenge, and the rewards of self-examination it brings.

I recently had the privilege of a conversation with a former student-turned colleague who recounted the story of a live performance he had attended that had deeply moved him: in his words it was “life changing.” No doubt he, and certainly I, also have pinnacle musical performances I have given as well as received – it makes me wonder what other 10-10 challenge concepts could flourish in the musical playground and crucible of the Web 2.0?

-CD

Some years ago, as early middle-age was ramping up my interest in my Irish ancestry and my longtime love of Celtic music I stumbled across an intriguing album by iconic traditional band The Chieftains in which they journeyed to Nashville and teamed up with some of country music’s top figures. The album, called Down the Old Plank Road offered an interesting range of music which ranged from textbook-country with added Celtic instruments such as whistles and ullian pipes to classic Irish musical forms reincarnated across the Atlantic.

I had never taken much of a liking to, nor interest in country music, but the excellent performances, the historical connection from my recent interest in the history and culture of one line of my family (and tangentially my admiration for the 2000 Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou, its soundtrack and the recent rise of interest in American Roots music they helped spark) had my attention. While doing my Masters in Music Criticism I wrote a paper on a McLuhan reading of the transformation of ‘old time’ music through 20th century urbanisation and industrialisation into the nostalgic and even glitzy modern country music – and then back to its roots; I studied the rise and evolution of popular music through the advent of recording, broadcasting, and the tortures of World Wars and festering post-slavery racial tension. I started a Celtic band, Chroí which is still playing today after eight years. I toured Ireland with a choir, cementing the land and its music – wherever it should wander and take me along – within my musical mind.

And then in 2013, in an unusual moment in my career as a freelance choral musician, along came Carol Barnett’s The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass, completing yet another circle, to my long knowledge of and relationship with church music, in what had already for me become its ever broadening circles.

Back in Nashville, the Chieftains reached into the shared culture of the connected people of the Old and New worlds, and found among other connections the “Come all Ye” ballad, common to both. An excellent example is found in the 1947 Merle Travis coal-mining classic Dark as a Dungeon – in it the balladeer, having summoned the listeners with the famous opening words “Come all ye…” warns of the dangers of a life spent mining coal (incidentally a common means of employment for Irish seeking work away from their native land). Another extraordinarily poignant example from the same album is Molly Bán, which warns of the prevalence of gun culture through relating the tragic tale of a man who shoots his beloved having taken her for a swan.

With the significant role played by Celtic peoples in the settling of the New World it is unsurprising that their folk idioms are evident in the new culture, but what has particularly struck me about the Irish American connection is its resilience, and visible presence in genres thought to be uniquely American.

As much of music making for me feels exclusively within the realm of ideas for this unusual quarantined moment I develop some of these themes in a currently postponed concert of the Georgetown Choral Society. Visit the page for the Choir’s episodes of Choral View Radio here on ideasaboutmusic.ca for a look at where that line of inquiry had taken me.

-CD