BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, the entire nature of our industry has shifted — seemingly overnight — with artists forced to abandon their live events and projects.
But despite such mass cancellations, musicians are proving they have the power to take some control over what can only be described as a horrendous situation — and adapt with ingenuity, determination, and creativity.
In this interview series, we document the COVID-19 impact on the Australian arts industry while facilitating a candid discussion about what it is like to work during this difficult time. We hope this series will bring hope and solidarity to our creative community – things we need now more than ever.
Here, we chat with Julia Fredersdorff — artistic director of Tasmania’s Van Diemen’s Band. As we experience COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions, this violinist talks about the complexities of working within an arts initiative that thrives on touring and collaborations with interstate and international artists.
Julia, how was your life changed when the pandemic was first announced?
For me, the changes started even before the announcement. At the end of February, when the Italian outbreak of COVID-19 started escalating, Van Diemen’s Band had two guest Italian artists — Enrico Gatti and Elena Bianchi — due to get on a plane from Bologna. We had to make the call — literally the night before they left — to cancel their involvement. They had their suitcases packed and everything.
Luckily, there were few cases only in Australia at that point, and we were able to proceed with our Italian Baroque Sessions project thanks to a lot of re-arranging of programs and long days from me and my colleagues. Soon after that, I left for Melbourne for a project with Latitude 37 and it became evident once we had finished rehearsals that the tour could not proceed.
It was a strange feeling getting on a plane the next day, knowing that might be the last time I would play chamber music for the foreseeable future.
I know we are all going through this, and that there are people suffering all over the world, but I am going to be perfectly frank: this pandemic has been catastrophic for the arts, and I am grieving. Not only have I and my fellow artists around the world completely lost our income, but we have lost our sense of purpose and identity.
We are grieving for those cancelled projects — those which we have been working on for years and may never come to fruition. And most importantly, we are grieving the loss of live performance and being on the stage; the alchemy of being in a room performing with generous like-minded musicians. The magical atmosphere of an appreciative audience coming along for a musical ride. That sense of connection and the absolute uniqueness of the occasion. That is what we love to do, and who knows when we will be able to do it again.
I am a performing artist who is not allowed to perform and, as a result, there is just, well, emptiness.
These are issues that most certainly must affect everyone involved in VDB. Your time spent planning, rehearsing, and even socialising is now taken away. How do you compensate for that? How is it affecting your group’s dynamic?
For a while there, I went into hibernation. I really needed to retreat from the world to come to terms with what was going on.
I have been checking in with people to see how everyone is doing — many VDB performers come from interstate, so we have a remote relationship anyway. But given the weirdness of what is going on, it is really cathartic to talk to people and work our way through the enormity of this pandemic.
Only in the past few weeks I have started planning in earnest, and that has mostly been inspired by grant opportunities that have become available. It is still so difficult to plan when there is no timeline; even once restrictions are lifted or even partially lifted, will audiences want to be seated like sardines in the post-COVID-19 recovery era?
These are new problems for us, and they are challenging, but they are also inspiring a whole lot of new creative thinking!
I am very grateful for the telephone and the ability to have meetings online. This is a platform that has proved invaluable in the past two months, and with some friends we are doing virtual dinner parties, which really helps generate an artificial sense of connection. So we are lucky that we have such good technology to help us through this thing; I do not take it for granted.
While in social isolation, when you’re not communicating with your colleagues online, how do you fill your day?
I am having to be disciplined so I don’t get mopey. Certainly having kids around keeps thing lively for a start, and living next to a 6km bushwalking track really helps, so I have recently clicked into a regular exercise regime which helps to boost the morale.
Kunanyi/Mount Wellington, where I live, is such an inspiring place — walking in nature really puts things in perspective for me. Podcasts are saving my life right now whilst on these walks — there is such a massive world of information available to everybody everywhere.
Work-wise, I am giving myself deadlines or setting up meetings so I stay motivated. Motivation is one of the most challenging things right now. I also put my instrument down for a while, but I am going to start working on 17th Century diminution licks soon. Because I can!
Interestingly, you’ve decided not to go down the road of online performance. Only a small handful of musicians have followed suit (one of which is recorder artist Alicia Crossley, who we recently interviewed in this series). Why did you make this choice?
This has been a large topic of conversation for me. I think the online performance platforms which have appeared are amazing — I have been particularly impressed with the Melbourne Digital Concert Hall series, which are quite literally live performances only — they are not staying online, and they are not pre-recorded. I think this is a really wonderful opportunity for the artists, and in the case of most has provided vital income. Most freelance musicians live hand-to-mouth, so this initiative and those like it are indispensable.
I have also seen a few people doing daily live performances, which I find really lovely, because they are literally like a musical offering to the world. I really appreciate the generosity of this. There have also been some really beautifully filmed clips of masked singers performing at appropriate distances from each other, which I have found very moving.
I am feeling now though that the online world is becoming saturated, and I have made the decision not to compete in that space with the groups that I am involved with. This is for a few reasons: one being that the ensembles I am involved with — mostly VDB and Latitude 37 — involve interstate musicians, so reuniting us would be logistically tricky and an artistic compromise.
The second reason harks back to my former response about live performance. In the case of Van Diemen’s Band, our mission is to take live performances to regional and remote areas of Tasmania. This year, we had two regional tours programmed and we have had to cancel the first of these. Rather than putting this program online and considering it done and dusted, we have decided to postpone it. When we did our last regional tour, I literally had audience members coming up to me in tears to thank us for coming to their town. We were able to provide them with a profound musical experience, and you can feel this in the room when you are playing — there is literally nothing like it, and it is simply impossible to replicate in any other way. So in many ways, the online performance space has been very clarifying on this subject — it is a good stop gap, but it is not as good as the real thing.
In place of online performing, you’re also working on a couple of other projects — including a podcast, and some recordings. Tell us about why you’re undertaking these projects during lockdown, and what you’re excited about.
As a result of VDB’s decision [not to stream online], we have turned our attention to podcasts, and we are currently researching a new 12-part podcast series. This is a space we had intended to explore but had never had the time! We have the former ABC broadcaster Christopher Lawrence — he’s my husband, which makes the social distancing thing conveniently less complicated — lined up to present, and we will be exploring several interesting subjects, mostly pertaining to music, but not exclusively. We will be providing more detail soon about the subjects and interviewees for the series, but it is a really exciting project for us.
We have two recordings already in the can. The first to be released will be a CD of Bach Cantatas for baritone with David Greco through the ABC Classics label. We are in the editing process right now — it is going to be a stunner. Our other recording of the Handel Concerti Grossi Opus 3 for the Swedish BIS label has had its release pushed back to next year — probably wisely so — so as not to be released in Europe in the midst of the coronavirus crisis.
I am feeling really lucky that we did these recordings in close succession before the pandemic started, as it would have been impossible to record them now or in the next couple of years with the restrictions in place and the uncertainty of the aviation industry.
Still, before this interview, you told me you wanted to start touring as soon as possible once Tasmania emerges from self-isolation. How are you feeling about the way touring will bounce back? Do you think people will be afraid to attend concerts, whether it’s to do with health anxiety or social anxiety? Or do you predict there will be an influx of performances, and audiences, hungry for arts at the same time?
You are completely right about audiences and health anxiety — this is going to be one of the major post-COVID-19 era challenges for us. I have been wracking my brain for ideas to address this, and I have been in discussion with some really unique spaces in which it might be possible to do socially distanced performances with smaller audiences and shorter concert times. In fact, the shorter concert format is something we had already been exploring in our Lunchbox Concert series at the Hobart Town Hall.
For this reason, we are planning to have our VDB Fiddles — our three-piece fiddle band — ready to jump in a car and get out there to play all across the state, once the news of restrictions being lifted is announced.
My hope is that there will be plenty of available spaces and a huge appetite from audiences, so as long as we can make the appropriate distancing arrangements for the performances. We are so excited to get out there again — whenever that may be!
For VDB in its larger formation, we will need to wait a little longer, as many members of the group are from interstate — so we will need to wait until interstate travel restrictions are lifted before we can make anything happen. Another concern we have is how affordable flights might be once the restrictions are lifted. It all remains to be seen.
At the end of the day, what do you hope to learn from this unusual life experience?
It has been traumatic, but clarifying. It has made it really clear to me personally what I do and why I do it.
I have been overwhelmed with the sense of community which has arisen out of this event, and ultimately it has highlighted the importance of place and ‘being’ in the world around you. The genuine unprompted acts of kindness we are seeing every day are so heartening, but the real heroes are those at the frontline, and I have so much respect for the health professionals who are literally willing to risk their lives doing what they do. There is nothing more powerful than that.
Ultimately, it will be the same for the arts, whatever the aftermath, which will be both inspiring and restrictive in a social and an economic sense. The arts will continue on, because they just do. This event will encourage us to work together and adapt so that we can continue to make art.
We have some really tough times ahead, but if we all band together, we will stay afloat.
Anything else you’d like to let Australia know about?
I would just like to make a general call out to your readers that if you know anyone in the arts industry, in particular those who live alone, check in on them. Make sure they are okay. We are a sensitive, fragile bunch — and a phone call could literally be a life-saver!
Visit the Van Diemen’s Band website to stay up to date on its initiatives during and beyond COVID-19.
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