The essay’s trajectory begins with an account of the genesis and premiere of the Corona-Meditation, which provides the contextual backdrop for the following music-analytical engagement with the piece. The aim of the present essay is rather to understand the Corona-Meditation as a product of the pandemic as much as an artifact poietically and aesthetically transcending this historical context of origin. However, despite the indisputable relevance of the COVID-19 pandemic as a factor to be acknowledged in this engagement, it is also mandatory in such an approach to avoid overly constrained or reductive readings of the Corona-Meditation that see it only in light of the pandemic, miss features of the piece eluding this specific interpretative horizon, and thereby effectively over-interpret the influence of COVID-19 on creativity and cultural expression. As a result of this encounter, the essay contributes a detailed case study on the impact of the pandemic on musical creativity to the growing scholarly discourse of “COVID-19 musicology.” In this regard, the essay also seizes an opportunity to expand this discourse beyond the present prevalence of social-scientific and psychological viewpoints by employing approaches more germane to the humanities, especially critical and reflexive engagement with the details and particularities of individual cultural artifacts. It aims at providing a close analytical, emically informed, and historically contextualized understanding of the Corona-Meditation’s multi-faceted character. This essay is a critical musicological encounter with this composition. In the case of the composer Gerd Kühr (* 1952), the pandemic and the socio-cultural effects of the measures implemented in containing it have inspired him to write an unusual piano piece-the Corona-Meditation. Another response is numerous songs written and recorded by musicians across the world that deal in one way or another with COVID-19: songs intended to lift the spirits of those hit by the crisis, songs educating about hygiene measures, songs criticizing official reactions to the pandemic, and so on. Streaming events, simple video recordings of solo performances, and more elaborately constructed split-screen videos of ensembles from all varieties of genres have become ubiquitous. Confronted with these consequences, musicians (and other cultural workers in the field of music) have tried to actively cope and engage with the situation caused by the pandemic. The magnitude and full ramifications of these consequences are yet to be ascertained. Possibilities for live offline performance and even rehearsals have been drastically confined throughout extended periods, with serious cultural, social, and economic consequences for societies as a whole and the individuals that constitute them. The COVID-19 pandemic and the fight against it have had a fundamental impact on musical life throughout the world. Drawing on comments by Kühr on the compositional design of the Corona-Meditation and considering different actual performances and potential realizations, these investigations move through the macro-, meso-, and microlevels of the piece and are linked in their analytical narrative by a recurrent guiding metaphor of “dialectics.” After a section describing the methodological and theoretical frame, a series of salient structural and processual features of the composition is considered in musical analysis. It aims at providing a close analytical, emically informed, and historically contextualized understanding of the Corona-Meditation’s multi-faceted character, thereby contributing a detailed case study on the impact of the pandemic on musical creativity to the expanding scholarly discourse of “COVID-19 musicology.” In this regard, the essay also seizes an opportunity to expand this discourse beyond the present prevalence of social-scientific and psychological viewpoints by employing approaches more germane to the humanities, especially critical and reflexive engagement with the details and particularities of individual cultural artifacts. The piece, written for a variable and unlimited number of pianists, is a creative response by Kühr to the social and cultural consequences of the measures implemented in Austria and other countries to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Gerd Kühr’s Corona-Meditation premiered on April 30, 2020, in a transnational online performance with more than 50 musicians, hosted by the Graz-based music festival Styriarte.
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