This Side of Fifty: Contagion: Music in Pandemic Times

As 2021 winds down, we will see retrospectives of this year in the press, on TV, and on the radio. There was such a retrospective in the New York Times this past Sunday. It was a full section of 2021 in photos. It was very well done.

Just this evening, Facebook informed me that my friend Ara Topouzian just published his latest bloggy bit that was retrospective: When Did That Happen? Yes, that Ara Topouzian. I have dedicated some serious and humorous posts about him in this blog. (A linked list will be provided at the end of this piece).

Ara’s blog is called HYE Times: A journey to preserve the past. HYE means Armenian in Armenian. So, it is Armenian Times. The past he is trying to preserve is the music we play and it’s migration to and evolution in the United States. He will make connections and general observations within the context of his focus on Armenian music.

Case in point, is his latest offering. Ara begins by noting that our memories are AC and BC. That is Before Covid and After Covid. Time seems to have moved slower since the pandemic became parts of our lives. This has blurred our recollection if something we did was BC or AC. Ara put it more succinctly. “When did that happen? COVID has fogged my memory as to when certain events happened!” Indeed, I have experienced exactly that phenomenon. I am certain many of us can relate to this.

For musicians, who make their living performing for live audiences, the pandemic has been very disruptive. I am not talking about the top names and acts in the most popular genres of music. I am talking about really talented musicians that play in the orchestra pits and those that play at festivals, weddings, parties, bars, and so many other venues. These musicians had decent livings and had, from my perspective, pretty cool lifestyles. For this class of musicians, the pandemic seriously hampered this cash flow, performances, and strained their cool.

Ara and I are not full-time musicians. We are part-time. We are avocational. But, in that part of our time, we love to perform for live audiences. We enjoy having people enjoy listening or dancing to our music. The listeners and dancers feed off the energy generated by the musicians and the musicians do the same off the energy of those enjoying the music. It is just not the same when performing virtually.

I play in the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble (MEME) of the University of Chicago. Traditionally, we do three live concerts a year: Turkish, Persian, and Arab. We practiced 10 times for each concert. The practices were a lot of fun. The concerts were awesome. Our last concert BC was in February 2020. It was a Persian Concert. With the start of the Covid shutdown, we met virtually over Zoom but could not play or practice that way due Zoom not really allowing two people to speak at the same time and something called latency (two TVs on in the same house and not quite in sync with one lagging a microsecond or ten behind the other). We did record four videos in the 2020 - 2021 academic year. Our director, Wanees Zarour, did an awesome job with the scores and editing of our individually recorded contributions.

We returned to live practices and a live Turkish Concert on November 18, 2020. Here is a video on Facebook of Aşık Veysel's classic Uzun İnce Bir Yoldayım in which I had the honor of playing the prelude taksim. It was wonderful to perform for a
live audience with my dear colleagues in the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble.

The next day I drove to Detroit to play in a concert that Ara just wrote about in his blog at Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor. We were a trio that included Jerry Gerjekian on dumbeg. We had a wonderful time and I look forward to the next with Ara and Jerry and MEME… depending on what the Pandemic allows for.

We shall see what 2022 brings.

------- My Bloggy Bits on Ara Topouzian ----