Alfie Moiśes, a musician currently quarantining in Miami, FL, plays bass in an all brown, all femme punk band. The band, Axetone, was supposed to start their first tour on March 20.
“Once there were talks about shows possibly cancelling, within a day or so people were contacting us and cancelling shows,” said Moiśes.
The reason for these sudden cancellations is due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has led to similar situations for multiple musicians.
Alongside being in Axetone, Moiśes also volunteers at a week-long music-based summer camp called Girls Rock Camp. Girls Rock Camp is a camp held all around the world for young girls and non-binary youths.
The volunteers work with the kids on a specific instrument, such as bass, guitar, vocals, drums, and keyboard. At the end of the week, the kids and their bands put on a showcase for the community.
Moiśes was going to volunteer at GRC Miami, St. Pete, and Kanas City. This summer was going to be Kansas City’s first Girls Rock Camp.
“The Girls Rock Camp Alliance does a meetup right before camp starts to talk about ways to improve camp and get to meet other volunteers,” said Moiśes. “This is the first time in 14 years that they’ve ever had to cancelled.”
There are talks on how the staff could possibly carry out the camp online and challenges that may arise.
Tucker Johnson, a student at Pennsylvania State University, composes music for others to play while playing bassoon for the university’s ensemble. Due to COVID-19, multiple performances that Johnson was scheduled to perform at, or have a piece of his performed, were cancelled.
“Your music doesn’t exist until it’s performed,” said Johnson.
This is Johnson’s senior year and is looking into graduate programs to further his knowledge in composing. The cancellations of performances have hindered his ability to apply for graduate programs.
“For grad school, you need recordings of your most recent works,” said Johnson.
Due to the lockdown, Johnson has been working on projects that would have otherwise been put on the backburner because of performances.
“I’ve found that through this, my way of writing music has been different, I’m digging deeper,” he said.
Tyler Broderick was touring under their musical project, Diners, when talks about the virus became more serious in the United States. Fortunately, the Diners tour had ended around the time places started to shut down.
“I haven’t not had a tour planned in 10 years, it’s how I was making a living and I don’t know when the next one [tour], will be,” said Broderick.
Broderick is working at a grocery store in California to help make some money for the time being.
“I interact with people who are scared every day, it’s only going to keep sinking in,” said Broderick regarding their current work.
Despite not being able to go on tour and play live shows, Broderick has been livestreaming and using the extra time to work and perfect their music.
“I bet you people will be hesitant when booking tours, they may start booking bigger rooms and have less people.” Broderick continued, “It’s interesting now, because every musician is on the same level because of this.”
They Hate Change is a hip-hop duo from the Tampa Bay area. They Hate Change consist of two best friends Andrè and Vonne. This year was supposed to be their biggest touring year yet. It was supposed to kick off at South by South West conference/festival, which is considered a rite of passage by some musicians.
This was the first year that they had people booking for them, but that all crumbled under the coronavirus. They were getting text messages one after another about cancelled shows, shared the duo.
Through quarantine, they’ve had to find new ways with working on new music even though they couldn’t see each other.
“Now we have four versions of one song. We didn’t do that before. Now we have the time to explore ideas and fine tune the songs,” said Andrè.
Quarantine has allowed them to polish their songs as a group.
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