1:1 Concerts for a pandemic: Learnings from intimate musical encounters

In the midst of Covid19 lockdowns in Europe, the initiative 1:1 Concerts was founded in Germany: a single listener and a single musician at a 2-metre distance in a non-traditional performance space, sharing a 10-minute non-verbal musical encounter. By mid-2020 the 1:1 Concerts model had expanded to several other countries, including Australia, where currently over 450 Concerts have taken place across six cities. In early 2021, the authors conducted an online survey and series of focus groups with musicians, listeners and facilitators (‘hosts’) of 1:1 Concerts in Australia, seeking perspectives on their experiences of the Concerts. Camlin’s (2014) three dimensions of music – aesthetic/presentational, praxial/participatory, and social – served as a conceptual framework to guide thematic data analysis. Findings indicate that the intimate non-verbal, locational and musical aspects of the encounter generated strong feelings of connection, privilege, and pleasure for participants; for some, recent distressing experiences of Covid19 lockdowns, enforced social distancing and live-arts deprivation served to heighten those feelings. We argue that while 1:1 Concerts retain presentational aspects typical of Western classical music concerts, the model emphasises the social, relational, and ethical dimensions of musicmaking, prioritising process as well as product in ways that hold relevance for music and music-making as a social resource, well beyond the pandemic era.