Improvising Self-Expression in the Time of a Contingency that Has Eliminated Contingency

The forms of musical performance improvised during the Covid-19 lockdown through the creation of a distanced or virtual co-presence of performers and listeners have certainly had, from the very beginning, a bitter taste of nostalgia (in the sense of romantic Sehnsucht) for a lost reality. They have been the sign of an absence that aspired to be filled. What was previously a given has now become a utopia—the present utopia of recovering, in the future, a lost past, perhaps even in new or different ways.