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Screenland

Livestreaming the Seattle Symphony Became a Source of Connection in Dark Times

Credit...Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

There was a bit of a cacophony at first, as conflicting melodies emerged and subsided. This was the chaos of preparation, the warm-up, but after a few moments the orchestra went quiet. It felt like a long, deep breath, and so I took one, too. The graphic advertising the concert as “Live From Benaroya Hall” in Seattle disappeared, revealing the conductor, as he took his place onstage, all eyes on his upheld baton. The music started softly and then grew stronger, filling my living room: floating flutes, a charge of clarinets, the friendly vibrato of bassoons. The strings played a single note, across seven octaves.

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CreditCredit...Seattle Symphony

It had been a scary week in Seattle, then the center of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. The virus was spreading in nursing homes, and there were more deaths being reported every day. The governor of Washington had just banned all large gatherings and closed all schools in the Seattle area. There were runs on food and supplies. There were already layoffs and sure to be a lot more. Though it was clear that we were at the very beginning of what would be a long and spiraling crisis, the region’s hospitals were even now running low on supplies, personnel and beds for critically ill patients. Every small decision — to go to the store, to see friends, to eat at restaurants, to visit the elderly — was suddenly taking on a new moral weight. Within just a few days, as it sank in what truly caring for one another needed to look like, even those choices would be gone.

When I heard that the Seattle Symphony, which had been ordered to close like everything else, would be livestreaming free concerts during the crisis, I almost cried. I had never actually been to one of its performances before, even though I live less than two miles from Benaroya Hall. But now, seeing my city shut down around me, I couldn’t wait to watch. The performance felt symbolic: a declaration that connection and solidarity and collective beauty would continue, that we could still gather together even as we stayed apart. I thought immediately of the tiny poem Bertolt Brecht wrote in the midst of World War II: “In the dark times/Will there be singing?/There will be singing./Of the dark times.”

I pictured the musicians, dressed in their black suits and dresses, playing to the emptiness of a grand theater, while the rest of us gathered around our laptops — like the families, hungry for reassurance, who listened to F.D.R.’s fireside chats during the Great Depression. Another viewer thought of a different historical analogue: the musicians on the Titanic who kept playing music for the ship’s passengers even as it sank. “Getting big ‘Gentlemen, it has been a privilege’ vibes,” he wrote in the chat box that accompanied the video. “Thanks for this.”

In fact, the performance wasn’t to an empty theater, or technically live at all — it was a livestream of a concert filmed the previous September. Alexander White, the symphony’s associate principal trumpet and chairman of the musicians’ labor organization, told me that the idea of continuing performances without audiences, which was under consideration just two days earlier, evaporated the day before the livestream. The symphony had been rehearsing Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 for its upcoming shows when the governor’s news conference announcing regulations on group gatherings began. “We realized the orchestra couldn’t actually safely be together,” White said. As a brass player, he was particularly aware of all the breath and moisture that regularly moves through a crowd of musicians. For the first time White could remember, everyone stopped playing mid-rehearsal, packed up and left.

In the chat box for the concert, viewers seemed puzzled. New arrivals kept asking why the video showed a live audience in a shuttered city. A commenter named David explained, “Not live, but not dead either.” Someone else wrote: “Yeah, it’s confusing. But hey, music.”

Over the next few days, as I stayed home and spent too much time reading the news, it began to seem that the more people were separated and confused and scared, the more there was music. Yo-Yo Ma started posting performances with the hashtag #SongsOfComfort, and more than three million people watched him play Antonin Dvorak’s “Going Home.” The Metropolitan Opera in New York announced it would be streaming previously filmed performances every night free; hundreds of thousands watched. High school students who wouldn’t get to perform the spring musicals they’d been practicing started singing for Twitter instead. A Seattle musician named Marina Albero, who suddenly found all her gigs canceled and the schools where she teaches closed, started organizing what she called “The Quarantine Sessions,” streamed performances that would allow musicians to still play and audiences to still support them. (When I called her, she stressed that the money, while welcome, wasn’t the main point. “It’s about being together and making something beautiful,” she said. “Nobody is anything alone. That’s what this situation is demonstrating.”)

And from Italy, where a cascade of deaths in overwhelmed hospitals presaged what we feared our own crisis would become, video after video emerged of people in lockdown, standing on their balconies or leaning out their windows, uniting the music of their violins and tambourines and accordions and saxophones. They played patriotic tunes and folk songs. They played “Smoke on the Water” and “Tequila.” Elderly women stuck inside stepped onto their balconies and danced.

It took about an hour for the Seattle Symphony to perform Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D major. The symphony is a glorious jumble, rejected by its first audiences as too modern: It incorporates klezmer accents, folk-dance melodies, a funeral march and victorious horn crescendos. I kept waiting for the performance to feel solemn and historic, to get goosebumps of the kind I have when I read Brecht’s poem or think about people singing “There’ll Always Be an England” during the Blitz. But instead it felt like life, strange and confusing and funny and scary and beautiful, and still going on. In the chat box, people leaned into the surreality of the situation, making jokes about the rude noise of one another’s candy wrappers, about being tall and blocking other people’s views of the stage, about whether “clap” emojis are acceptable between movements, when real clapping, per symphony etiquette, is not. “Mahler is an absolute unit of a composer,” someone wrote; sex bots invaded the chat. People celebrated the music, told one another where they were watching from and wished one another health and luck and safety in a changed and scary world. White, the trumpet player, watched the chat from his own computer. “It was endearing and heartening,” he said. “But it was also reality.”

By the time it was over, nearly 90,000 people from Seattle and around the world had tuned in. By comparison, 4,835 people bought tickets for the original three-day run of the symphony, back in the other world that was last September. The symphony made plans for more shows: experimental solos filmed in homes or the empty hall; group pieces merged together electronically; more livestreams of past performances. I knew I would want to watch them. I wanted the deep breath, the feeling of connection, even the jokes about sex bots. I wanted the woodwinds making the soft sounds of nature and the brass section trumpeting victory, whatever that might mean now.

Brooke Jarvis is a contributing writer for the magazine. She last wrote a Screenland column about hoax videos of disasters.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 15 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: House Music. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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