We are six weeks into the quarantine and time has gotten weird. Every day is very similar to the day before with no big scheduled events to define it and no future events to look forward to. This weekend had been on my calendar for months and I was very excited to attend The Long Play Festival at BAM, but alas, there will be no such event. When this began for us, and we packed up and left Brooklyn, everything was unfurling rapidly — in the course of a few days we went from normal schedules to everything canceled indefinitely. Most of my work happened to be on semester break at the time, so I had some vacation time to adjust; the first few weeks were novel and fun, focused on my family and playing in the woods here. Since then, I have pulled together the technological resources to do my job as best I can in the circumstances. I teach classes and lessons over Zoom and Google Meet and am suddenly spending all my work time in front of a computer instead of a classroom filled with children. The transition has been challenging, but everyone is facing the same reality so we need to make it work. The essence of what I do is still the same, sharing my joy of music with others, but the medium has changed and although nothing can compare with physically being in a room and making music as a group, we are fortunate to have this technology available and I hope that the skills I gain in learning how to communicate through a two-dimensional screen will make me a better teacher and person when we step back into our three-dimensional world.
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