What does a college music education look like during COVID?
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in March 2020, abrupt notices sent millions of college students scurrying to pack their belongings and return home. Almost a year after the virus dismantled in-person education, hundreds of thousands of music students in the U.S. — who rely on person-to-person contact, perhaps more the most — are still wrestling with a modified curriculum: online music lessons and performances, and forbidden in-person collaboration.
But players of wind instruments — such as trumpet, oboe, and bassoon — face a particularly challenging landscape. Due to COVID-19’s airborne transmission, the aerosol-generating way of producing sound in these instruments and the fact that these musicians physically aren’t able to wear masks while playing poses major risks.
Clarinetist Chloe Finder, a junior studying music education at New York University (NYU), is one of those players. In Finder’s twelve years of playing clarinet, the Virginia native never envisioned a music crisis, much less living through one. Finder reflected on their year-long experience with NYU’s altered wind music education and the challenges associated with it.
When COVID hit in March 2020 during the second semester of your sophomore year, what was that experience like?
When things kind of blew up, I was actually studying abroad in Prague last spring, as were many other music majors. We were all living in one dorm together and making music all the time. It was going from this moment where we were all really collaborative and creative together to just suddenly sent home within a day or two. And we were all isolated, so it was really a big shift.
As a musician, how are you dealing with the pandemic, now a year in?
I’ve been able to play music on my own because it doesn’t take a lot if you have instruments. I’ve also been writing music, but the collaboration part has been harder. Over break when I’m at home, I’m able to meet with my friends outside in my backyard. We can play together from a far away distance, but during the semester, I don’t have a backyard, so most of the music-making has been either what we’re doing with a chamber ensemble where you’re playing separately and then putting the recordings together. It’s sort of collaborative, but it’s not in the moment.
In one of my ensembles this semester, we’re using a lot of technology, like Jamulus, which is a music software where the latency is really low, so you can play together and there’s a tiny bit of lag, but for the most part you can actually play synchronously. Or on a discord [server] or something, where you can make sounds at the same time. The music that we’re writing is specifically for that virtual space, so it has lots of long notes or sort of an out of time kind of sound. You’re kind of gaming the system and playing through the lag. I like doing that.
The third mode would be our music education group sometimes holds an open mic event on Zoom, so you have one person performing at a time. It’s nice to hear what other people are doing and share what you’ve been doing. There are ways to be musical together, but I do miss playing in the same room, in the same space with someone at the same time. It really is unfortunate that there’s not really a way to do that now.
Everything in our lives has pretty much gone virtual, and that’s been especially difficult for music. Besides playing together and performing, what other aspects of your music education have been impacted?
A big one is conducting and practicing. Junior year is a time when we start learning how to conduct ensembles and how to direct large groups of students at a time. We haven’t really been able to do that at all because you can’t have large groups of students gather. Instead of directing, we’re broken up into little groups of three or four students, and it’ll be more of an individual coaching kind of situation. I guess in a way it’s nice because you do get to get a little more granular, in terms of evaluating individuals, singers, and error detection. But it’s not the same thing as standing in front of a larger group of people and directing. It’s definitely something that I and my cohort are concerned about going into next year because senior year is where you do your student teaching. Hopefully by next year we’ll be able to work in person with groups, but we’ll be kind of trying blind a little bit in terms of not having practiced it before.
In the guidelines for music and performing arts students, wind players aren’t allowed to rehearse in person, and are preferred to take lessons online. I’m curious if you’re taking online clarinet lessons, and if so, what that’s like?
My lessons have moved online. They have gone pretty smoothly. Luckily with the lesson, you’re just playing by yourself, so as long as you have a decent sound set up, it’s not too hard to do lessons online. Although it’s worse that there’s more of a disconnect between you and the teacher when you’re separated through a screen. But, I would say out of all of the music experiences this year, online lessons have been one of the less challenging transfers.
There are challenges with sound quality with online lessons. What changes have you noticed in your clarinet playing in this past year when all music lessons and classes were online?
In terms of where I practice and the fact that I don’t practice in front of anyone live, I think that’s probably affected my playing to a degree. I practice in that corner of my dorm, and it’s not the most acoustically sound. I find it personally kind of stressful to go to an actual practice room, because I’d be walking 20 minutes there and 20 minutes back, and I’d be outside touching things. I’d rather just practice in my room, but there’s certainly an acoustic difference between playing into a corner and playing in a concert hall. You project in different ways in those scenarios, and when you’re in the smaller space, you have to constantly remind yourself, ‘Oh, I need to be playing like I’m in that larger space or on stage.’
Everyone’s wondering when the pandemic will end and when everything will go back to normal again, but it’s clear some things may stick. What are some things you’ve done during the pandemic that you wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do if it weren’t for COVID?
I joined a composing ensemble. I don’t think I would’ve joined that because what mainly drew me to it is the idea of a smaller group that was going to be focused on making music that was native to a virtual platform. I had wanted to join this ensemble before, but I was locked into the concert band life, like most wind players are, and I didn’t want to do two ensembles. The way concert band worked last semester was you learned your parts and separately recorded them and put them together with the rest of the members, which is fine, but I was really not into that idea. That’s what pushed me to switch into this ensemble, which I’m really happy to be doing. I’m doing it again this semester, writing more music for it, which is cool.
Musicians have been responding to the pandemic in different ways. In the past year, there have been so many online performances, and I saw that you performed at the NYUnited show about a month ago. How do you feel about online performances?
I do like online performances. I think there’s definitely something to be said for the accessibility of online performances. There is something very freeing about being able to sit on your bed and not have to dress up and go somewhere and find a seat and sit there for hours. I’m on the board of the Reform Jewish student group, so I helped to run the Shabbat services every Friday night. Our services have always been musical, which is non-traditional, but we’ve always included music and singing and making music together in our planning. When we made the shift to online, our attendance has actually gone up a little bit versus in-person because sometimes we get people who are from other parts of the country or other parts of the world.
What other ways have you been connecting with your audience besides through online performances?
I’ve been sharing a lot of my music online on just SoundCloud for now, although I know it’s not the best platform, so I should probably move it somewhere else. I’ve also been making art and posting online, so having a more tangible output that you can go back and look at. A lot of us musicians will create stuff, and we’ll be proud of ourselves, and then we’ll move on. I think it’s valuable to not feel precious about everything because sometimes you just want to do something for fun. But I also think it can be nice to look back and be like, ‘Oh, here’s what I was doing during this time. I wasn’t just doing nothing for months and months,’ especially during this pandemic when it’s so easy to feel like you’re not doing anything productive. That can be its own kind of weird stress. You are doing something. A) You’re surviving pandemic. That’s pretty impressive. And B) You’re making art. You’re not wallowing all the time.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
