DOES MUSIC BE THE FOOD OF LOVE BY ROSIE KNIGHTON
I am super excited to welcome the very talented Rosie Knighton, a recent school lever from The Leys School in Cambridge with the next in our series Creatives in a Time of Covid 19. Rosie writes very movingly about how when her life was suddenly put on hold and A levels were cancelled, music gave her a purpose.
DOES MUSIC BE THE FOOD OF LOVE
‘If music be the food of love, play on’. This quotation, one of the most famous lines in Shakespeare, is declared by Duke Orsino in the opening of Twelfth Night. Orsino is deeply in love with Olivia, but his love is unrequited. To ease his struggle he hopes that if the ensemble continues to play, he will be stuffed full of the music, taking away his appetite for Olivia.
When I decided that I wanted to write this post about music in a time of COVID-19, this quotation immediately came to mind. For so many people music has helped to metaphorically stuff them as Orsino hoped, assisting them through the plethora of hardships that have been endured by so many these past months. On a national scale, music has brought communities together, such as as they stood on their door steps each Thursday and sang ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’. For others perhaps it has been the comfort of hearing Dame Vera Lynn’s infamous ‘We’ll Meet Again’ on the TV or Radio throughout lockdown, brought back to prominence by the Queen herself by quoting it in her address to the nation. Music has been shown to have great power these past months, both as providing a distraction, but also acting as a catalyst for acceptance and unity.
On a personal level, music has also deeply affected me personally through this crisis. As a year 13 student who had just had their A-Levels cancelled, I suddenly went from going flat out to having nothing to do; everything stopped in my life with no clear idea of when it was going to start again. My hunger grew strong for everything I had lost out on and could not do. However, I soon found that music was a way to satiate that hunger - I had been given the gift of time and this was a way to embrace it. We’ve had my Grandad's spinet for a few years now but I’d never got around to tuning it. Carefully, string by string, I lovingly tuned it by hand until it transformed from an instrument of discord and cacophony to one of harmony and elegance. Filling my days by dancing my fingers over the keys, playing Bach chorales to hits from the musical ‘Hamilton’, the music provided a respite from everything that was going on around me.
Despite these immense impacts both on a personal and national scale, it is undoubted that the music industry has entered a time of crisis. Guidelines mean that events remain cancelled: concerts, gigs, musicals, workshops, the list goes on. The timeline seems only too similar to that of Twelfth Night - the opening image of musical harmony and bliss is undermined as the play goes on through both continued confusion and misunderstanding, parodying the opening assertion of music and love by the end. Therefore, the question is whether will this happen to the real life music industry? In truth it is too soon to tell, but personally I don’t think music will ever be allowed to die, however hard the times may be. Music has been around since humans began, and surely if the last few months have taught us anything about it, it’s that it can be a really important force in our lives. It may not have the power to stuff us full like Orsino hoped, but it certainly has the power to help keep the wolf from the door.
Rosie Knighton is a recent school leaver from The Leys School, Cambridge. She took English Literature, Music and History for A-Level and her other passions include cooking and cricket. Since lockdown she has taken up an interest in journalism, writing a series of articles which can be found on her page here: https://medium.com/@rosieknighton. She has also assisted in setting up a new website What Now? which is aimed at providing accessible news written by its readers for young people: https://www.whatnownews.org/.
