The last time I played clarinet with my band was on March 10, 2020. It was a typical Tuesday evening rehearsal: 10 musicians crowded into a small basement room, sipping beers and chatting between tunes. Brass instruments, woodwinds, and drums blared, with bass lines audible from the stairwell.
Since 2004, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra has practiced in the same space, a couple of blocks from the East River in Brooklyn, N.Y. The room is cramped — chairs and music stands crowd every corner, shelves are crammed with instruments and sheet music. With no windows or AC units, air circulation is minimal.
When I walked up the stairs after practice, I had no idea that the space we’d filled with boisterous pop covers and protest tunes would sit quietly for more than a year. The COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world in March 2020, isolating musicians like me from the art we love. Millions of high school and college musicians were barred from their band rooms, children’s lessons were canceled, and professionals lost performance opportunities and income streams.
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Though restrictions are now easing, we still face questions about how our instruments play into infection risk. Wind instruments — brasses as well as woodwinds like my clarinet — produce sound through human breath. And human breath spreads COVID-19. So how can we perform while keeping ourselves and our audiences safe during the pandemic and beyond? To find answers, wind musicians, including myself, turned to science.
An ill wind
The hazards of live music hit home when news broke of a superspreader event among members of the Skagit Valley Chorale in Washington state. On March 10 — the same day as my band’s final rehearsal — 61 members had gathered to sing. By the time Gov. Jay Inslee instituted a stay-at-home order two weeks later, 52 members of the choir had either tested positive for the new coronavirus or were assumed to have it. Three singers were hospitalized, and two died.
The group had been careful, avoiding physical contact such as handshakes and hugs, putting plenty of space between their chairs, and using hand sanitizer. At that time, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health agencies were primarily telling people to avoid close contact and contaminated surfaces to reduce transmission risks. But many musicians quickly realized that something else was going on.
“When we saw the Skagit Valley choir spread, we knew right away that [the coronavirus] was spreading via aerosol,” says Mark Spede, director of bands at Clemson University in South Carolina. He is one of the lead researchers on a coalition that developed COVID-19 protocols for performing arts students. It was “pretty clear,” he says, that the virus was spreading through the air. On May 15, 2020, Skagit County health department staff reported in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that the “act of singing, itself, might have contributed to the transmission through the emission of aerosols.”
I quickly realized that wind instruments like mine had to pose a similar danger. To play it safe, most wind musicians stopped playing together. My band briefly entertained the idea of practicing outside, but as New York City shut down, we switched to virtual rehearsals. These meetings were a poor substitute for in-person sessions. As anyone who’s tried to sing “Happy Birthday” over Zoom can tell you, video calling platforms just don’t cut it for music practice. These platforms are built to highlight one speaker at a time, creating a painful lag in sound when people try to sing or play simultaneously (SN: 4/24/21, p. 22).
“School band shut down,” recalls 16-year-old Hannah Scheuer, a bandmate of mine and a student in the New York City public school system. Unable to enter the school building for months, classmates who rented instruments from the school couldn’t bring them home to practice. A survey conducted in late April by Spede and colleagues revealed that out of 30,000 U.S. high school and college music programs, about one-third had no in-person rehearsals through the end of the 2020–2021 school year.
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