Different media, same relationships: What the Iris Piano Trio learned from the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

The Iris Music Project is a non-profit dedicated to reimagining residential and healthcare communities as spaces of creative exchange. By February 2020, our chamber music group, the Iris Piano Trio, had developed a model for music programming at Charles E. Smith Life Communities (CESLC) in Rockville, Maryland (United States), that emphasized collaborative relationships between professional musicians and community members. The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted the Trio’s work and tested its model. In this article, we describe how the Trio remained connected and relevant to CESLC residents by experiment-ing with virtual programmes that adapted our model to a digital setting. We argue that our prior relationships with residents and staff enabled us to impact their lives throughout the pandemic despite the isolation created by COVID-19 closures. The pandemic strained, but did not fundamentally change, the Trio’s ensemble-in-resi-dence model, suggesting its potential as a generalized model in the field of music and health. © 2021 Intellect Ltd Notes from the Field. English language.