A Year of No Music in NYC

Musicians marked a grim anniversary this week: it's been a year since the NYC music industry shut down, leaving most musicians without pay and benefits for the past 12 months, including the musicians of the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, NYC Ballet, all of Broadway.

"It’s been a brutal year of no work, no pay and no benefits for many musicians," wrote Local 802 President Adam Krauthamer in the union magazine Allegro. "It’s been a year without the usual live entertainment that we all enjoy and rely on. It’s been a year without performing in a normal setting for audiences and our community here in New York. It’s been a year of illness and death for so many of our loved ones. It’s been a year that we’ve survived and that none of us want to repeat. But it’s also been a year of hope and change. It’s been a year when we found new ways to communicate and even perform together. It’s been a year of Zoom, video editing, recording and learning new tech. It’s been a year of fulfilling new projects that we’ve finally had time to work on. It’s been a year of figuring out what’s most important to us: family, friends and loved ones. It’s been a year of electing a new president, and a year where we finally allowed ourselves to feel hope again. And it’s been a year of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, with new vaccines and new projections for returning to an open society. We only survived this year because we stuck together. That’s also true for the union: the only way that Local 802 survived was through the hard work and generosity of our members. This we will never forget." Read more here.