Impact on Musicians
‘The Arts’ is an ambiguous sounding term that is often tossed around to describe many fields. Unlike other things in life, it is not just naturally occurring. One does not just happen to come across of string quartet in the middle of the woods. Instead, it is created by people, and in the music field, those people are musicians. Many of whom have been struggling throughout the pandemic.
Elaine Klimasko, Violinist with the NAC Orchestra, and founding member, discussed the ways in which musicians struggled financially through the pandemic. One example she offered shared the experiences of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, who, as she explains: “just lost their salary. They lost everything. I mean, some of them just had to move back to their parent’s homes in different states and everything. It's just been devastating.”
Klimasko shared this with me when we spoke in October 2020, but the problem has persisted. In March 2021, an article published in the New York Times revealed that the Met Opera Orchestra musicians had been unpaid since the beginning the pandemic (Jacobs 2021). One of the orchestra’s cellists even sold their bow to keep up with mortgage payments, switching to an inferior bow, one that they played with as a child. Moreover, in the video below, Klimasko explains in further detail the economic and emotional devastation, people in the music industry have been experiencing.
This example shows that musicians were not only impacted in the beginning of the pandemic, but well into 2021. This problem is also not limited to American orchestras. Klimasko shared with me the challenges faced by Ottawa-based musicians: “Here, locally in Ottawa, I mean, we have, you know, fine musicians in the National Arts Centre Orchestra, but we also have very fine musicians who aren't part of the orchestra, but come in or sub with us sometimes. You know, we're on a regular basis with many of them. And they're fantastic musicians, you know, from all sections of the orchestra, and I mean, they have nothing now.”
In addition to financial struggles, Klimasko speculates that the pandemic has taken a toll on their mental wellbeing: “It's devastating not to be able to pay your rent, but it's also devastating for your soul not to be able to make music and do the thing you love to do the most. So, I just, my heart just goes out to them. I just don't know how they're managing.”
And yet, despite these difficulties, there is reason to feel optimistic about the ways in which artists are experimenting with new projects. Jonelle Sills, a Toronto based soprano, one of the members of CBC’s “30 hot Canadian classical musicians under 30, 2020 edition,” spoke with me about the pandemic’s silver linings for Canadian performers.
Sills soloed with the NAC in the Fall of 2020 and indicated that the NAC, among other institutions, had to, as she told me: “look a little bit more locally to work with their seasons. Because of Covid they had to realize: okay, well, we can't, you know, get all the great people that we like to that maybe are not in Canada. But hey, there's 30 artists that are emerging that we can come alongside and come and support them, and work with them.”
And in some ways (as she notes in video below) she was happy with the little break from performing she had experienced at the beginning of the pandemic. Which she took, to avoid mental burnout.
Sills also mention that she used the beginning of the pandemic as a break: “I think for the first two months, most people were just like, chilling out, because they had to, which is important. And I think I did that, and just take a breath and re-evaluate things and then, you know, now I can have some time to learn some really hard repertoire that I've always wanted to learn, and I can just take my time.”
This, of course, is an optimistic way of thinking, which has its benefits. But there is another truth that exists that the same time: with the current nature of work in the music industry, many musicians were out of work and struggling to pay rent and their mortgage payments.
Though, as she spoke about in the video below, musicians and arts organizations have creatively worked around the obstacles the pandemic has created. Including, moving performances outdoors — something that is rarely done in the North American classical music world, until recently.
Listening to these stories, I was reminded of a quote I’d once heard. In his book In the Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach, Ernst Fischer (1963, 48) wrote: “In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.” It’s a very interesting concept to think about, art having a sort of abstract function that can both mirror the downward trend of society and bring about change, positively, even. But perhaps, given what we know about the distress that musicians are facing, we can consider the following revision: in a society that is decaying, music, that is created by humans, brings us closer to their emotions, feelings, and can inspire people in times of unending cynicism—yet, at the same time, the people bringing music to society are suffering, needlessly, and if society does not change this, what will?