From escapism to learning: How the arts got me through 2020

I know I’m not the only one who’s grateful that 2020 has ended!

After an incredibly busy year launching a new book and starting this column, I paused during the holiday season, took a couple of digital detox days (deliberately not turning on the computer), and began to try to put the past year into context. How could I hold two (or maybe three or more) conflicting thoughts in my head at the same time? 2020 was marked by so much death and misery and disruption, some of which might have been avoided with more coordinated federal leadership.

And yet, thanks to the rapid adoption of new technologies, I have been able to connect with so many colleagues and groups, and spread messages of hope, optimism, and Black brilliance. I could literally Zoom or Google Meet anywhere in the world, all from my home office in New York City.

Many have said that because of the pandemic, technology leaped ahead two years in just two months. That has been a mixed blessing in terms of education. On the one hand, schools’ shift to remote learning left behind children lacking access to technology and robbed those able to log into virtual classrooms of the social interactions so critical to effective learning. On the other, technology expanded people’s locked-down lives with everything from animal cams to nightly operas. I am fortunate to be in the latter group – technology has enriched my experience immeasurably this year.

The “pure joy of learning”

I have always loved education – and always been good at it. It was important to my parents, and therefore to me, that I earn excellent grades, so I did. As an adult, I have been able to transcend the quest for A’s and perfect scores, and now I luxuriate in the pure joy of learning.

My Juilliard Evening Division music studies are a good example. Since last March, I have romped through a variety of remote classes: Bach and the Fugue, the Harlem Renaissance, Beethoven’s 250th Birthday, and Origins of the Blues. Coming up, I will be studying the work, history, and influence of jazz greats Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Parker. 

I have also discovered scores of Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center talks by resident lecturer Bruce Adolphe and have come to appreciate a number of composers whose work I had tended to avoid. As Mr. Adolphe explains in lectures from 2013 and 2015, French composer Gabriel Fauré “flirted with keys as he lived his romantic life.” Hungarian composer Béla Bartók “used the total chromatic spectrum” and “invented polymodal chromaticism.” And British composer Benjamin Britten “created a world of harmony and bitonality” to express the loneliness and isolation he felt as a gay man before homosexuality was legal in the United Kingdom.

Throughout the pandemic, I have attended almost daily concerts and dance performances, the vast majority of them free. Appropriately (and happily, from my perspective), several of the arts organizations I frequent have begun to charge for their online programming. There is something breathtakingly sad, though, about spending just $15 to hear pianist Jeremy Denk perform brilliantly before scores of empty seats at New York City’s 92nd Street Y.

I have been particularly impressed by the creativity of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. I am a patron of the Ailey company and have urged all my friends to join me in watching several new socially distanced ballets created specifically for video. I have also watched illuminating taped conversations between Artistic Director Robert Battle and a range of experts, including Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis. Their dissection of the creative collaborations between composer Duke Ellington and choreographer Alvin Ailey was so rich that I listened to it twice while it was available as part of the Ailey Forward virtual season. I judge an event to be successful if my brain cells tingle, and those cells tingled every time I tuned in to an Ailey performance or conversation! 

Beauty, sorrow, and progress

A dear friend complimented my “discipline,” saying, “You kept your eye on the prize, despite the pandemic.” I like to think I proved that, as David Finckel, co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, said, “Music is immune to the virus.” He’s right. Finding ways to stay connected to the arts, despite my own and the performers’ literal confinement, helped hold any hints of sadness or loneliness or depression at bay.

And yet sometimes you are supposed to cry. 

New York City’s Lincoln Center organized an online series of Sunday concerts this past spring called Memorial for Us All. The series honored the pandemic’s victims, with some of the names of those who died scrolling by during performances. On Sunday, June 7, the New York Philharmonic’s principal clarinet, Anthony McGill, did something different. The orchestra’s only African American principal player (yes, in 2020!) included the names of some of the Black men, women, and children killed by police – George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, and too many others – alongside those lost to the pandemic. Their names scrolled past while he performed two compositions by Damien Sneed and his own arrangement of “America the Beautiful,” a deliberately discordant version that I choose to call “America the Not-So-Beautiful.” After the final note, Mr. McGill took two knees.

Sometimes, you are supposed to cry – and then march forward, if you are able, to see what the new year will bring. 

Jacqueline Adams is co-author of “A Blessing: Women of Color Teaming Up to Lead, Empower and Thrive.”

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