Why coronavirus crisis offers musicians a chance for life-changing reflection

Haywards Heath-based cellist Pavlos Carvalho would have been – as he always is – one of the busiest contributors to this year’s Festival of Chichester.
Pavlos CarvalhoPavlos Carvalho
Pavlos Carvalho

Sadly, though, the Festival, along with everything else the length and breadth of the country, has been cancelled. Overnight the diaries of musicians everywhere suddenly emptied. However, now the shock has subsided, Pavlos is relishing a chance to rethink and to reassess.

“Every musician will have a different story to tell and be affected differently by it, but certainly the initial struggle is that for performing musicians thousands of pounds worth of income was wiped out with no one knowing how long it will take to recover.” In a sense, we knew it was coming, but only in the same way that Trump was elected: “We were all thinking ‘No, it can’t possibly happen… yes, it can… no, surely he won’t get elected’, and then he did, and it was a bit like that with the virus. With all the social media and the fake news, people were thinking no, it won’t happen, no, it can’t happen, and the fact is that however much we knew it was actually coming, people just weren’t prepared for it. And it was the same with concerts. People were saying yes, no, yes, no. Some people were postponing; some people were saying ‘Let’s see how it goes.’”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

And then the lockdown came: “My first thought was concern, and it is not just the work. If you are a musician, this is the life blood that runs through your veins. I have been doing professional concerts ever since I was a 13-year-old boy, and I am lucky enough to be doing a job that I love and that I am passionate about. It is also about meeting up with your friends and fellow musicians to rehearse and get together. But there is also the financial side. Performing is my main source of income. And so you are thinking was the government going to do something to help support freelance musicians?”

But then other considerations started to slip in: “I have got a young family, and for the last ten years, I have been travelling so much and working so much that I never get to see them as much as I want. I had been thinking ‘How can I manage to see more of them? How can I plan more time? And so what has evolved, I think, is a sense of opportunity – while also being compassionate and really hoping that people can stay healthy. A chance to think about things and perhaps do things in different ways. Once you accept the financial disaster and also while remembering this is such a horrible situation, you realise you can to some extent sit back and re-evaluate things. In everyday life you are so busy there just isn’t the time to think about changes and to make changes. But now you have got the time to think about the changes that will give you a better-balanced life. It has all come about as a result of really horrible circumstances, but it has offered a chance for reflection and meditation and thought about how we conduct our lives.”

Certainly the delivery of music has changed – and will probably be changed for ever.

As Pavlos says, musicians are joining up online to perform with each other from opposite sides of the world: “People are finding imaginative and innovative ways to fulfil their creativity. Nothing actually beats being together properly, and I am not tech savvy at all, but once we have got over the initial shock, people are finding ways to be active and to be positive and to make music and to try not to worry about the future. There is nothing we can do about the future. We have got to be the ones to drive an initiative that will help us.” Pavlos worries to an extent that people might go too much down the route of online performance once some kind of normality returns; that concert-goers might be harder to get out of their homes: “But everything is on the table. But I do think that once we get back to normal, the way we deliver music will have changed.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad
Hide Ad
Hide Ad
Hide Ad
Hide Ad

*************

A message from the Editor, Gary Shipton:

In order for us to continue to provide high quality and trusted local news, I am asking you to please purchase a copy of our newspapers.

With the coronavirus lockdown having a major impact on many of our local valued advertisers - and consequently the advertising that we receive - we are more reliant than ever on you helping us to provide you with news and information by buying a copy of our newspapers.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Our journalists are highly trained and our content is independently regulated by IPSO to some of the most rigorous standards in the world. But being your eyes and ears comes at a price. So we need your support more than ever to buy our newspapers during this crisis.

Stay safe, and best wishes.

Gary Shipton

Editorial Director

Related topics: