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

Abstract

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, fear, and danger during the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This editorial is being written in July 2020, some five months into the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world beginning in the winter. Of all the places hit hard by the coronavirus, the United States has seen the highest number of cases and deaths, disproportionately among the poor and the non-white population, and has exhibited startling incompetence and confusion, led by an ill-prepared, mendacious, and irresponsible Federal Government. The United States has been hampered by its inadequate and discriminatory healthcare system, the evisceration of long-established resources in scientific and medical expertise, and a public health system dominated by private enterprise. To make matters worse, the pandemic occurred while the nation and its public institutions were paralyzed by a polarized political and cultural environment, in which fragmented extremist fantasies and conspiracy theories that undermine science have flourished within the population, pitting citizens against one another and depressing any shared sense of a common cause.