Wednesday morning. 
Thursday morning.
I struggled to find a title for this post. Eventually I settled for as close to my personal truth as is possible. Life is strange, our times are strange, and things look to stay strange for some time to come.
First of all, the State of Oregon imposed a four-week ban on all public gatherings over 250 people. I went in to a scheduled rehearsal with the Oregon Symphony, and instead had a joint management/player meeting about what our course of action would be. I don’t know just yet what the definitive plan is, but I do know that the orchestra will not be giving any full-orchestra concerts to in-person audiences for the next four weeks.
There are many unknowns, some known, some not, that need to be explored. I think I can collect unemployment insurance for this time I’m off work. I don’t know if I’ll be paid from this moment forward. I do know that force majeure applies to our CBA, so management is under no legal obligation to either pay us or keep our health insurance in place while we’re out of work. I don’t know (and chances are, neither do they at this moment) how that’s going to pan out.
And this is magnified on down the line. The restaurants near the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall will have severe downturns in their business due both to the virus and to the fact that we won’t be giving concerts there. They’ll have to cut worker hours, those workers will suffer, and so on. The economic impact of this outbreak is, at the moment, incalculable, and could be as defining for the current century as the Great Depression was for the last. I hope I’m wrong.
All over the country, arts administrators are, with a great sense of urgency, trying to figure out ways to honor the spirit and the word of the bans that are in place, and still maintain a viable economic outlook for their organizations. It’s a huge undertaking. It’s made significantly more difficult by the fact that we rely upon live audiences almost exclusively, and that the nature of a symphony orchestra is that you sit in very close quarters with your colleagues. We cannot maintain a 3 foot separation and still get 70 to 100 musicians on the stage at the same time. So, innovative responses will be necessary, and I know that the administration and musicians alike are scrambling to come up with alternative plans.