When the COVID-19 pandemic made live concerts impossible, musicians around the world faced the biggest challenge of their lifetimes. Even if they were lucky enough to escape the disease, their livelihoods were in danger–as were, of course, the livelihoods of so many others.

If there was anything good to come out of this global health crisis, it was Zoom, the videoconferencing application that had been around since 2013 but that many of us discovered only under these extreme circumstances.  Zoom quickly became our new best friend.  As we got used to communicating with the rest of the world almost exclusively via computer, musicians sought, and found, ways to reach out to their audiences through cyberspace.  Countless concerts were livestreamed from living rooms and basements, and numerous compositions were performed in empty concert halls, but listened to all over the world.  

Shawn Okpebholo, a composer currently on the faculty of Wheaton College near Chicago, captured the bright side of what we might call the “age of Zoom” in a seven-minute piece for strings and percussion.  Okpebholo’s strong Christian faith and his commitment to African-American causes have been constant sources of optimism, even–as the composer himself has stressed in an interview–in his secular or non-political works.  The study of African musical traditions has also played an important role in Okpebholo’s artistic evolution, in part because his father was born in Nigeria.

Written at the height of the pandemic, Zoom! was commissioned by the US Air Force Band, which gave the first performance–live-streamed–by that ensemble, led by Col. Don Schofield.  For a tempo marking, Okpebholo wrote “Steady, with confidence” and accordingly, the piece sounds upbeat and optimistic throughout, even during a slower section in the middle.

The fast part is based on two major musical ideas:  one jazzy and more irregular in its rhythmic shape, the other more flowing.  The slower section, marked “Contemplative,” is dominated by a meandering violin melody accompanied, for some of the time, by pizzicato (plucked) strings.  Both themes of the fast part then return in modified form, until the piece ends quite abruptly, as if to say:  “your Zoom session has expired!

~ Notes by Peter Laki copyright 2024