Musical Performance during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic: Days of Future Passed?

All of the dimensions related to music performance have experienced deep transformations, crisis, and reinventions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The scope of our interdisciplinary research team – including musicologists, ethnomusicologists, sociologists, and popular music scholars – is to map different ways of attributing meaning to the actions related to any form of organised sound production. The act of music making was, since then, digitally remembered, represented, reimagined, relocated, and remediated in a variety of forms. At the same time, the performance of music – especially since it became impossible, as its practical organisation seems incompatible with any effective form of physical distancing – has become an ideal referent and an arena. All of the identitarian stances related to music as a form of personal and collective self-recognition and construction of cultural values confront themselves around the (now impossible) act of performing live. These dynamics will be observed through the lens of a number of case studies related to traditional religious rituals, operatic performance, discourses about live clubs, and the circulation of musical performance through social media. We will discuss how much they reflect our current understanding of the cultural activities generally referred to as music production and consumption, and how much they foreshadow future developments in these sectors.