Melissa Errico Reflects on Finding the Music in a Turbulent Year

From Covid quarantining to Inauguration Day, Errico discusses music’s promise of hope.

The past year has been full of shocks — philosophical, practical, fundamental — and perhaps the one that stalled me into a state of frozen disbelief was the idea that singing — the central act of my life — was now toxic. The pandemic had made it essentially impossible to sing in public, and I had started to wonder if I would ever sing to an audience again. And that made me start to wonder about the role of public singing, the role of music in our lives, and in our America.

I worried my way through the last few months, sometimes aloud. I thought to myself, I used to be an angel in the choir and now I am Typhoid Mary. How will we perform? But we did, on Zoom and things like it — in our closets, and on videos — and maybe, I figured, eventually, we will make song while masked, in person. How do we go on with our art? Where and how do we open our mouths to make music? What does technology promise and what does it hold back? How do we go on singing?

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