Impact on the Arts
In Canada, and especially in Ottawa, there’s always so much talk about the importance of the arts. So, if the arts are so important, and they were threatened, society would do something to protect them, right?
I spoke with Stephanie Morin, Second Flutist of the NAC Orchestra, about how the arts have weathered through the pandemic. She's very grateful for her current opportunities, having been appointed to the position just recently in Fall 2020. However, her peers were not so lucky. Being a freelance musician means having less job stability which did not fare well during the pandemic. Many of whom quit the profession and have retrained, she noted. And since our conversation in Fall 2020, when the future seemed especially bleak, as Morin told me (and explains in the video below): “We were the first ones to close, and we're going to be the last ones to open fully. And that can be, I guess, just disheartening.”
That being said, there have been a number of initiatives set up by Canadian institutions. Early in the pandemic, the NAC received $600,000 from corporate sponsorship, which enabled them to start the #CanadaPerforms relief fund for musicians (The National Arts Centre 2020). Additionally, the government of Canada’s federal budget plan, released in 2021, has promised to put $1.9 towards the arts, culture, heritage and sport sectors, over the next year (Canadian Heritage 2021).
Despite the promise of federal funding and corporate sponsorships, the pandemic has caused plenty of damage to performing arts communities. I recall a conversation I had with Anita McAlister, Professor of Trumpet at the University of Toronto, at the end of August 2020. I had asked her, looking for performance career advice, about what kind of a work a young trumpet player might expect to find in the future. She told me that it was too hard to say, noting that even professionals with many years of experience — some of the best trumpet players in Canada — were struggling to acquire performance opportunities, due to the effects of the pandemic.
I’ve even noticed difficulties among my peers. While some stuck through the agonizing technical difficulties of Zoom lessons with moderate success, others have not. Many students that have dropped out of music school, have taken a year off, or have stopped practising altogether. Even I took a break from practising during the pandemic, for about three months, the longest break I’ve taken in 10 years, since I first began playing the trumpet.
This isn’t an anomaly, either. In my conversation with Morin, she told me: “I have a lot of friends and colleagues that I've made over the years who are freelancers and they're fantastic, and they bring so much to the music industry and the field, and they're just not really able to do that right now. And that's a really big problem. And they can't get the support that they need. So, I mean, there's a huge number of musicians that are either considering or have already decided to retrain because of this. And, yeah, it’s just, you know, it kind of shows you — we've seen how it's difficult to get your priorities straight, sometimes.”
This doesn’t mean, however, that musicians have given up. Chris Lee, Principal Tubist of the NAC Orchestra, and I spoke about the changes musicians have made during the pandemic. Including, the livestream concerts the NAC Orchestra was producing. As he expressed in our interview (captured in the video below), Lee speaks in-depth about the cruciality for the NAC Orchestra to continue performing, describing the circumstances an ecosystem that must be kept alive. But he also noted that continuing with determination, despite the hardship, is in the nature of being a professional musician: “Well, we're professional musicians, right. We have to, it's become our purpose in our life,” he told me. “I think that that's where it comes from, our own personal drive as musicians.”
There are also some adaptations to the pandemic that musicians have liked. Speaking with Morin, she told me that the pandemic has made for some interesting changes in the ways that orchestras operate — despite the anxiety that comes from change — and might bring some positive newness to the orchestra world. More of which Morin speaks about in the video below. “There's this fear for a lot of classical organizations, that if they change things, then they're going to lose their audience that they already have. So, if they try something new, and it doesn't work, then they could alienate people who liked what they were doing,” Morin told me.
Throughout the pandemic, though, the arts have received financial help, and many are thankful for it. I’m not arguing against that. But is it enough, and are people still slipping through the cracks? I understand that the nature of music performance — gathering closely in large groups to listen to music — was never going to go smoothly in a global pandemic. And for me personally, safety is my number one priority. But nonetheless, musicians have been critically harmed by this pandemic. Morin was able to concisely sum up this thought: “I think that the attitude of the artistic community has been overwhelmingly positive in the face of a lot of negative.”