The Future of Music in America: The Challenge of the COVID-19 Pandemic

This verse from the Old Testament describes how the prophet Elisha called on God to perform a miracle. There was a desperate need to fill a dry ravine with water. Music became the instrument of rescue, and the musician the giver of a new lease on life. The idea that music was in some measure a privileged means of communication, a bridge between the human and the divine, and thereby crucial to alleviating human distress through its capacity to bring forth the power of God, has never entirely vanished from our collective consciousness, despite the increased dominance of the secular over the sacred in Western history since the late eighteenth century. A case in point from the far more recent past can be found in H. G. Adler’s magisterial and exhaustive 1955 study, Theresienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of a Coerced Community. Adler, himself a survivor but not a musician, understood that performing music and listening to music in the camp by the incarcerated inmates, which had once “fulfilled a real need,” had become a “curse” when music making ceased to be voluntary and became subject to the sadistic whim and orders of the SS. But for a long stretch of time, concerts by inmates—Adler cites performances of music by Beethoven and Brahms by fellow prisoners—were “triumphs of pure morality over the adversity of an almost unbearable present.” Not because it was a means to an end (e.g., water), but music alone elicited the capacity for hope and goodness—theologically speaking, gifts of the divine located in the biblical account of creation. They were brought forth by the playing and hearing of music. A renewal of faith in this theological image and in the justification of music as indispensable to life and therefore hope and survival in dark and difficult times would be welcome as each of us struggles with isolation,