Now a truly global pandemic with a tight hold on economies, health systems, and ways of life across East Asia, Europe, North America and beyond, the beginning of the week saw cases of COVID-19 exceed 350,000 while deaths surpassed 15,000 worldwide. Europe was increasingly the epicentre of the crisis, as deaths in Italy pushed past 6,000, while with now more than 2,000 deaths, Spain lagged behind but appeared to be following a similar trajectory. The United Kingdom followed much of the continent in belatedly shutting down all but essential businesses and banning gatherings of more than two, telling people to stay home for the next three weeks. Saudi Arabia and Egypt imposed evening curfews, and the United Arab Emirates – home to Dubai International, one of the world’s busiest airports – suspended all passenger and transit flights as the virus hastened its spread in the Middle East. Myanmar, hitherto the most populous country in the world without a recorded case of coronavirus, reported its first two cases. But South Korea – with the second-largest outbreak in Asia – at least reported the fewest new cases since its 29 February peak, while after two months of strict lockdown, China prepared to ease restrictions outside of Wuhan in the wider province of Hubei.
By the middle of the week, Spain had recorded 3,434 deaths, overtaking China as the country with the second most coronavirus fatalities. In Italy deaths approached 8,000, though the rate in the hard-hit north appeared to be stabilising. India entered into a twenty-one-day lockdown, announced at short notice by prime minister Narendra Modi. In Russia, Vladimir Putin postponed a vote on constitutional changes which could keep him in power until 2036, while declaring a week-long paid national holiday in a move to halt the spread of the virus. Countries took unprecedented steps in an attempt to counter the economic impact. Despite mixed messages from President Trump, stock markets in the United States had rebounded early in the week as the Senate debated the merits of a $2 trillion stimulus package. Though the deal was approved on Wednesday night, as the death toll in the country passed the 1,000 mark, jobless claims soared beyond three million, more than four times the previous record. Forecasts suggested that Singapore was headed for its worst ever contraction, forcing the country to unveil $48 billion in stimulus measures. And the G20 group of major economies pledged a global financial injection in the region of $5 trillion.
With the weekend drawing close, global cases of coronavirus topped half a million, while the United States surpassed China and Italy as the single country with the most COVID-19 infections. There was a sense of movement in Hubei, but China acted to overwhelmingly reduce all international flight travel. Australia announced a mandatory quarantine for all returning citizens, South Africa commenced a nationwide military-patrolled lockdown, and in the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson became the first world leader to confirm he had contracted the virus, with the country’s health secretary and chief medical officer also isolated and showing symptoms. Italy and Spain registered grim new records, with their highest single-day death totals of 919 and 769 respectively. There were modicums of good news, as in the United States the $2 trillion stimulus bill was signed into law, the Food and Drug Administration gave emergency use authorisation to a molecular test promising results inside fifteen minutes, and data showed significant improvements in air quality over Europe.
On Saturday it was Wuhan’s turn to witness the easing of restrictions, as the capital of Hubei and the heart of the virus in China reopened for some domestic travellers. South Korea for the first time reported a fifty percent cure rate, with more recoveries than current infections. Yet in Spain the death toll topped 5,000 after a record 832 deaths in one twenty-four hour period, while in Italy the number of the deceased surged past 10,000. There was at least some hope that the countries were reaching a plateau in the rate of new cases. In America, deaths passed 2,000, doubling in the span of a couple of days, prompting dismal estimates and tighter social distancing recommendations, though President Trump stopped short after threatening to quarantine New York. Australia limited public gatherings to two, while in Africa, Zimbabwe ordered a lockdown lasting twenty-one days and Ghana and Nigeria closed down their two largest cities. The haste of India’s lockdown left people scrambling for food, forcing Prime Minister Modi into a public apology. By Sunday 30,000 people worldwide had died as a consequence of COVID-19, with cases in the region of two-thirds of a million.
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Opera houses and orchestras from the Met to the Berliner Philharmoniker continued to open up their archives, Living Room Concerts and Stars In The House offered Broadway in miniature while Jazz at Lincoln Center provided a daily dose of bebop and cool, and the likes of Pitchfork and Koir furnished playlists, talks, and live streams for fans of popular music. Last week Bandcamp waived its revenue share for one day, as part of an effort with the aid of labels to put more money directly into artists’ pockets. The result saw sales of music and merchandise soar to around 800,000 items and $4.3 million, more than fifteen times Bandcamp’s usual Friday take. This week Spotify announced its own music relief programme, with a plan to match donations to relief organisations including MusiCares, PRS Foundation, and Help Musicians up to a total contribution of $10 million. In the process Spotify joined Amazon Music, Facebook, Sirius XM & Pandora, Tidal, and YouTube Music in contributing directly to the MusiCares fund, established by the Recording Academy to help offset the loss of income caused especially by the cancellation of live events. At the same time Spotify outlined plans to allow artists to fundraise directly from fans through the streaming service’s website and apps.
Please don’t stop the music, can’t stop the music, won’t stop the music. This week artists continued to release new music at a steady pace. Sufjan Stevens and his stepfather Lowell Brams hastened the emergence of Aporia, which received a YouTube premiere followed by a wider release. A New Age album built around extended jam sessions, showing the influence of ambient electronics and sleek science fiction films, Aporia marks Brams’ retirement from Asthmatic Kitty, the label he and Stevens founded and have managed together for the past twenty years, with Stevens styling the record a ‘story of stewardship and mentorship’. Meanwhile Bob Dylan released ‘Murder Most Foul’, after a string of wrinkled Frank Sinatra pastiches his first original song in eight years. The sprawling sixteen-minute single unfurls through the assassination of John F. Kennedy a harrowing evocation of communal grief, before bounding through pop-cultural references into a rhapsodic playlist rich in period jazz and blues.
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Though as late as last week Shinzo Abe and the International Olympic Committee were still insisting that Tokyo 2020 would commence as planned, with a full schedule of sporting events and stadia teeming with spectators, by Monday Olympic organisers were beginning to feel the strain. Team Canada announced that they would not be travelling to Tokyo, with the Canadian Olympic Committee and Canadian Paralympic Committee calling for the postponement of the games. Australian athletes were reportedly told to start planning for an Olympics in 2021. In turn, Shinzo Abe the Japanese Prime Minister admitted for the first time that a postponement was possible, while the IOC stepped up scenario planning and vowed to finalise discussions within four weeks. In fact the decision fell swiftly, as on Tuesday the 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics were officially cancelled owing to the impact of coronavirus, with assurances to Tokyo and the starting pistol tentatively recocked for the summer of 2021.
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Manu Dibango, the popular saxophonist who successfully blended jazz and funk with the traditional sounds of his native Cameroon, died on Tuesday in Paris at the age of eighty-six having contracted coronavirus. Born in Douala in 1933 in what was then French Cameroon, Dibango moved to Marseilles as a teenager and put his early music education to good use, becoming proficient first on the piano, then on the saxophone and vibraphone. He moved to Brussels, and toured Europe with Africa Jazz under the bandleader Joseph Kabasele, known as Le Grand Kallé and considered one of the founders of modern Congolese music. After spells in Congo and Cameroon, Dibango returned to Paris in 1965. He became best known for the 1972 hit single ‘Soul Makossa’, which following word-of-mouth buzz pitched at number thirty-five on the Billboard Hot 100. The song’s distinctive vocal refrain was later sampled by Michael Jackson on ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin” and by Rihanna on ‘Don’t Stop the Music’, though Dibango was forced to take legal recourse in order to obtain credit. He remained a prolific recording artist, and toured with musicians including the Fania All-Stars, Fela Kuti, Herbie Hancock, Bernie Worrell, Don Cherry, and Sly and Robbie. Recognised as one of the founding fathers of Afrobeat, in 2010 Dibango was made Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, in 2014 an eightieth anniversary concert at the Olympia was broadcast by TV5Monde, and in 2019 Dibango was still busy touring with the Symphonic Safari.
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The four-time Tony Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally died from complications of COVID-19 on Tuesday, at the age of eighty-one years old. Born in St. Petersburg, Florida, a graduate of Columbia College who wrote early scenarios for the Actors Studio, McNally’s first Broadway play And Things That Go Bump in the Night opened in 1964 to scathing reviews. He fared better off-Broadway when Next arrived there in 1969, in a version starring James Coco and Elaine Shore, directed by Elaine May. Such works were typical of McNally’s early oeuvre, comic satires burdened with themes of alienation and oppression, which prodded at the underside of American military and sexual mores. Turning to farce, McNally scored his biggest hit to date with The Ritz, set in a gay bathhouse in Manhattan, where a heterosexual businessman seeks refuge from his homicidal brother-in-law. The Ritz premiered on Broadway in 1975 with an all-star cast, including Rita Moreno, who won the Tony Award for best featured actress, Jack Weston, Jerry Stiller, and F. Murray Abraham, who reprised their roles on film the following year.
The AIDS epidemic darkened McNally’s writing, and he honed his work with a focus on his two obsessions, contemporary homosexual relationships and classical music, particularly the divine operatics of Maria Callas. Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune was performed off-Broadway in 1987 before McNally turned it into a Hollywood film starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer, while the television drama Andre’s Mother and the play Lips Together, Teeth Apart dealt with the lingering aftermath of AIDS. In 1993, McNally won his first Tony Award for the book of the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, an adaptation of Manuel Puig’s novel which explores the paradoxical relationship of two men pressed together in an Argentinian jail. The following year McNally won his second Tony for Love! Valour! Compassion!, about eight gay men on vacation, while more followed for the Maria Callas study Master Class and the musical Ragtime. McNally continued to write regularly for the stage, adapted the films The Full Monty and Catch Me If You Can for musical theatre, and wrote the librettos for four operas. In 2014 he produced a sequel to Andre’s Mother with the Broadway play Mothers and Sons. When he received a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement last year, he opened his acceptance speech with a typically wry observation, noting ‘Lifetime achievement, not a moment too soon’.
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In addition to the 2.5 million esoteric texts and old classics which comprise the Internet Archive’s core collection, freely available to access and download as they are part of the public domain, the online repository of digital material also operates a lending library, where with the agreement of academic institutions the archive offers limited access to texts under copyright. This week in the time of coronavirus, the Internet Archive announced a National Emergency Library, effectively giving members of the public online access to all of this reading material without the usual waiting lists. The National Emergency Library brings together all of the books from Phillips Academy Andover and Marygrove College, and much of the Trent University collections plus more than a million books donated from libraries worldwide, creating a total library of almost four million texts. While the focus is on books that are otherwise hard to access, either out of print or unavailable as ebooks, still the announcement courted controversy, as authors and publishers have condemned the Internet Archive for a lack of consultation and loss of income. The National Emergency Library is set to lend without restraint until the end of June, or whenever the coronavirus crisis lifts across the United States.
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Every year since 2002, nominated by the National Recording Preservation Board and members of the public, the National Recording Registry has selected for long-term preservation sound recordings which showcase the range and diversity of America’s recorded heritage and are deemed culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. The first four selections comprised fifty recordings apiece, and since then twenty-five recordings have been selected annually, so that this year the number of titles on the Recording Registry rose to a total of 550. Among the pop-cultural landmarks announced on Wednesday by the Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden were the Whitney Houston megahit ‘I Will Always Love You’, The Chronic, a G-funk classic, a springboard for Snoop Dogg, and the debut solo album by Dr. Dre, and the Village People’s disco dance fest ‘Y.M.C.A.’. There was space for the faded lustre and soulful alienation of ‘Wichita Lineman’ by Glen Campbell and Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis, for an Italian-American protest song, albums by Selena and Tina Turner, and pioneering conjunto Tex-Mex. The earliest recording on this year’s list is ‘Whispering’, a dance song by Paul Whiteman and his Ambassador Orchestra which scored chart success in 1920, while the selections encompass a breadth of culture, from Russ Hodges’ famous call ‘The Giants win the pennant!’ to a collection of traditional Afghan music, from Maria Callas and Puccini to Mister Rogers’ favourite tunes.
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The NFL draft, seven rounds of player recruitment positively bursting with potential, has become almost as eagerly anticipated as the football season itself. It threatens to upturn old hierarchies and gives stragglers new hope, as in reverse order based on the previous season’s standings, each of the thirty-two teams in the NFL get to pick from the cream of college football, or else expend their draft capital on future stockpiling or player trades. When the Kansas City Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers to win Super Bowl LIV at the beginning of February, as Andy Reid got bathed in Gatorade and Jennifer Lopez pole danced and Shakira flicked her tongue, the coronavirus still seemed far-flung. Instead by early March major sporting events were being postponed and cancelled in the United States and across the globe.
That put this year’s draft, scheduled to stretch from 23-25 April, under a blitz with no open receivers and no obvious way out. This week the NFL and its commissioner Roger Goodell announced that that 2020 NFL Draft will commence as planned, with the event still televised but relocated from Las Vegas and taking place remotely. Prospects and spectators will have to stay at home, while with team facilities closed coaches and general managers must surround themselves with technology rather than people in order to do their bidding and make their picks. The changed circumstances strike at the heart of the draft, which is usually a prolonged process of interviews and physicals and player assessment, but in typically censorious fashion Goodell warned off any criticism, suggesting ‘the draft can serve a very positive purpose for our clubs, our fans, and the country at large’.
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The classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki died on Sunday in his home city of Kraków. One of the most celebrated and excerpted composers of the twentieth century, an educator in his native Poland and an ambassador of his country’s music abroad, he was eighty-six years old and died after a long illness. A graduate of the Academy of Music in Kraków with a focus on choral forms and composition, Penderecki began his composing career in 1959, when he premiered three works at the Warsaw Autumn and won the Polish Composers’ Union youth award. The following year Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, a war-torn piece for fifty-two string instruments which helped to define the sonoristic approach to dynamics and texture, won for Penderecki international acclaim. The atonal, avant-garde St Luke Passion followed in 1966, as Penderecki expanded his sound palette by virtue of a large-scale choral work which drew from the Baroque.
The shifting textures, free-form notation, and prevailing atmosphere of existential torment which characterised Penderecki’s early work subsequently gave way to more traditional modes of composition, as Penderecki wrote symphonies, operas, choral pieces, and concertos for renowned soloists including the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. Continuing to operate with a sweeping gesture and a taste for commemoration, his compositions included the Polish Requiem, originally conceived to honour those who died in anti-government protests in 1970, the symphony ‘Seven Gates of Jerusalem’ written to mark the city’s third millennium, and the piano concerto Resurrection, defined as a response to the September 11 attacks in the United States. Penderecki served as the rector of the Academy of Music in Kraków, worked as a visiting professor, and conducted many of the world’s top orchestras. He won four Grammy Awards among other honours, including the Prix Italia, Spain’s Asturias Award, and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale. His music also found its way onto film, defining the dreaded soundscapes of The Exorcist and The Shining, and featuring in Children of Men and Shutter Island, while from Wild at Heart to the atomic bomb sequence in Twin Peaks, Penderecki has remained a favourite composer of the director David Lynch.
