The 95th Annual Concerts (Digital) of The Music Academy commenced here on Monday with Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist of World Health Organisation, calling for support to artists and artisans who could not embrace the digital medium.
Addressing the online audience at the inaugural event, Dr. Swaminathan said such artists were as vulnerable as informal workers. She said one of the aspects of a normal life that COVID-19 took away was the enjoyment of live music and dance performances.
The Renaissance was a case study about how a society changed after a pandemic, which in this case was the black plague, she said. “The plague almost ravaged 30-60% of the European population at that time.
When it arrived in England in the mid-1300s, it had sparked many societal changes that helped spur the Renaissance movement,” she said.
“Looking forward to our post-pandemic life, will it be as marked by creativity like the Renaissance that followed the plague? There may be similar opportunities for a soul-searching creativity to emerge from our time of solitude imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic,” she said.
On the pandemic, she said, “The emergence of the Omicron variant is clearly telling us that the virus is not done with us. We may be tired, we may be fatigued, we may be done with the virus. But as long as it can find opportunities to transmit itself, to continue to multiply and to replicate, it keeps looking for more people to infect. And the more it multiplies, it will mutate and change. That is just the nature of the virus and so we need to be able to live with the virus at some point and not allow it to take over our lives,” Dr. Swaminathan said.
Shorter durations
Earlier in his welcome address, President of the Music Academy N. Murali said as the pandemic still raged on, the executive committee decided not to take any chances, given the uncertainty of its trajectory, related restrictions and regulations from time to time.
The music concerts will be on for 12 days with 48 concerts in all and four concerts a day. Senior concerts are ticketed. Concerts will be of shorter duration.
There would be also one morning academic session or lec-dem from December 21 onwards.
Additionally they will have a three-day dance festival from January 2. The recitals would be confined to solo and Bharathanatyam, he said.
The talks were followed by the nadaswaram concert by S. Kasim and S. Babu (Nadaswaram); G.Rajan and M.Vijaykumar (Thavil).
