In an unprecedented moment for the OneBeat program, one in which we are unable to gather in person, we will virtually bring together 70 musicians from diverse cultural backgrounds and musical traditions. Together these artists will take score of their experiences over the last year, provide a space for our collective grief and reflection, and use this opportunity to rearrange our findings, taking time to imagine an ecology of musical practices with the aim of transfiguring new worlds.
This year’s edition of OneBeat questions how we understand and create new modes of grieving, care and healing. As we continue to adjust and adapt to rapidly changing realities, we consider the physicality of music and sound as a path to fostering both collective and personal actions of repair. Can we reimagine the reciprocity of touch through the making, traveling, and receiving of sound? Can we use our unique practices to examine listening, both personally and collectively, as a practice of care? What does it really mean to “heal”? How do music and sound fulfill different understandings of healing? What could we leave behind in a post-pandemic world? What has this moment of global “pause” given us that we could take into the future? In this year’s OneBeat we propose music as a curative practice, as a mode of being interdependently with others, and as a reiterative and improvised path of intentional care.