Listening in a pandemic

Like many, I have spent the last several weeks in a series of Skype/Zoom/FaceTime calls to friends and family scattered around the world, and one of the topics that has come up repeatedly, particularly among my musician friends, is what we’re listening to … or, more accurately, the kinds of things we often find ourselves unable to listen to.

I’d like to open the Divergence Press platform to contributions on that subject. What are you listening to? What are the sounds that draw you in, that provide connection or solace? What are the sounds that you are avoiding? Are you watching live-streamed concerts (and why/why not)? Are you listening to recorded music? Pre-recorded video? Historical performances? What repertoire do you find yourself drawn to? What repertoire are you avoiding? (Are you avoiding a repertoire that would normally be a significant aspect of your own work/practice/profession? Have the changes in your approach to listening also affected your creative practice?) How has the pandemic changed how/where you listen, or what technologies you are listening with/through?

We’d like to bring together a snapshot of current listening habits in the new music community, in all its diversity. Contributions can be as formal/informal or long/short as seems appropriate. For the sake of this particular subject, we’ll forego the usual Divergence Press peer review process, but the content we publish will still be (lightly) curated by the editorial team.

Submissions should be sent to the CeReNeM Centre Manager at cerenem@hud.ac.uk, with a subject line indicating a submission for Divergence Press. The press’s Notes for Contributors page will provide some useful advice about the submission process, though due to the nature of this call the guidelines around keywords, abstracts, word count, etc. can be ignored, particularly for shorter and less formal texts. And as always with Divergence Press, we welcome approaches and formats that take advantage of the expanded possibilities of an online platform.

Stay safe,
Aaron Cassidy
Director, CeReNeM