I was interviewed by the Tufts Daily on the Music Department’s response to COVID-2019 strictures.

Excerpts from the article by MEGAN SZOSTAK AND STEPHANIE HOECHST
September 8, 2020

Arts-related departments adapt to COVID-19 restrictions

..However, in the case of Professor of Music and Director of Graduate Studies John McDonald’s two upper-level composition classes this fall, transitioning to Zoom has included a number of other difficulties.

“You can’t play ensemble music if someone is in a different location,” McDonald said, which is something that becomes an obstacle when, as McDonald puts it, “one of the things that’s important for composers is to hear their music performed.”

With restrictions put in place as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the two concert series that McDonald had previously developed for composers to showcase their music, the Tufts Composers Concert Series and the New at Noon concerts, are now impossible. Instead, McDonald is planning what he calls a Tufts Composers PractiCast as well as a few New at Noon concerts as a way to broadcast what the composers in his courses are writing.

Given the recent university announcement that the performance of all wind and brass instruments, as well as singing, will not be permitted as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, these concerts will only include strings (orchestral and plucked), percussion and keyboard instruments, according to McDonald.

In addition to adapting to COVID-19 restrictions, McDonald is taking this opportunity to use these limitations as creatively as possible.

“I’ve been fond of talking about how composers thrive on limits, so this is a time of crazy limitations, and limitations that you don’t expect,” McDonald explained.

Therefore, McDonald is using these limitations as a framework for some of his projects — ideas he’s been thinking about include antiphonal music (music performed with a wide space between players), asynchronous music, an unseen performer and humming projects as a way to use the bounds of COVID-19 as inspiration for new projects.

“I’m developing themes that kind of work for the time period, I suppose you could say,” McDonald said. “That’s how my mind has taken off creatively, and I love that. I love thinking it through.”

Because many of the new restrictions have caused the music department faculty to rethink their lesson plans this semester, both [Frank] Lehman and McDonald stressed the importance of taking this opportunity to also create a more inclusive curriculum with regard to anti-racist discourse.

“We can use at least some of this energy and turn it into making a more just curriculum too since we’re already revising everything that’s been on our minds,” Lehman said.

McDonald expressed a similar sentiment — that when it comes to adapting to the pandemic or to the issues of race representation, especially in academia, the only way is to keep going forward.

“We need to keep working on it constantly. Keep reinventing, keep refreshing, keep revitalizing, keep trying to understand what needs to be done and what can be done, so those two things — it could be the pandemic, and it could be the anti-racist curriculum, very different subjects, but a similar kind of thinking where you don’t go back. You’re not going to turn around,” McDonald said.

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