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Oral History Interview with Erika Svanoe, 2023
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Oral History Interview with Erika Svanoe, 2023
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COVID-19 Oral History Project
Transcript of Oral History Interview with Erika Svanoe, 2023
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Transcript of Oral History Interview with Erika Svanoe, 2023
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COVID-19 Oral History Project
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1 Augsburg University’s Lindell Library Archives Interviewee: Dr. Erika Savone Interviewer: Gray Heiderscheit Date: March 28, 2023 Location: Augsburg University The Impact of COVID-19 on Augsburg’s Concert Band and Music Department: An Oral History GH: Hello I’m Gray Heiderscheit and toda...
Show more 1 Augsburg University’s Lindell Library Archives Interviewee: Dr. Erika Savone Interviewer: Gray Heiderscheit Date: March 28, 2023 Location: Augsburg University The Impact of COVID-19 on Augsburg’s Concert Band and Music Department: An Oral History GH: Hello I’m Gray Heiderscheit and today I am here on March 28, 2023 with Dr. Erika Savnoe to engage in an oral history about the impact of COVID-19 on Augsburg University and more specifically the impact on the Music Department and the Concert Band. With that, let's jump right into it. GH: So to start off, what challenges did you face rebuilding the ensemble after the pandemic? ES: This is still- it’s still a work in progress. This is the end of the academic year 2023, so this year started to feel almost back to normal—this year. Last year, which was 2021-2022–that was our first year being sort of back on campus really, I’ll talk about 2021-2022 first. Some of the challenges that we faced was a difficult recruiting year the year before. So part of what we do in the music department is we listen to students play auditions, and then we are able to offer them scholarships— all of that had to happen on zoom. There were actually some advantages but there were also some disadvantages. We didn’t have as many students coming on campus to visit at Augsburg, so I couldn’t hold my annual honor band which is a big project where I bring one hundred band students on campus, and that was basically one hundred students that I didn't have contact with— potential future Auggies. There were many things like that so far as—so yes, we had some difficulty with numbers especially in 2021-2022. Some of the other challenges were we needed to wear masks almost the entire year as wind players. I work with woodwind, brass and percussionists in my ensemble, so that means the woodwinds and brass in particular were having to put bellcovers on the ends of their instruments. There is scientific studies done that aerosol droplets are carried through wind instruments and there’s a certain amount of that that’s released into the environment. Bellcovers help with that but it also does hinder our playing, breathing, and how we operate a little bit as well. Those were some of the challenges building the ensemble back up. I think I felt this most in 2021/2022, when we were finally back when we had to wear bell covers, we had to wear masks—I felt like I couldn’t be as expressive as a 2 conductor as I would like because the lower half of my face and my smile was covered up, and those are tools that I use a lot in sort of my non-verbal communication to the ensemble, but it felt great because we were able to play music again. What I really noticed about that year is instead of having one freshman class, I had two freshman classes—is what it felt like to me. My juniors that year were the class that as freshmen, their last concert was cut short because they were freshman in 2020–I really had a few seniors, a few juniors. I had some students that transferred to other schools as well. What building the ensemble back up meant that year was having two thirds of the ensemble not understand what it meant to be in a college band. It felt like I was training on a level that I hadn’t experienced before, I just had less upperclassmen and I had a lot more really new students who haven't experienced a band rehearsal in reality with me. That’s what it really felt like, like I was training two freshman classes. Sorry that was a very long answer. GH: So as you talked about there weren’t many people coming in the band, so how did those numbers of people who were auditioning and trying to get scholarships— how were those different from pre pandemic to during the pandemic?. How did those numbers differ and how did you see the impact of those? ES: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s hard to say, we had a big— I feel like the freshman classes have been really big. Where I think the numbers really differ were actually in retention from students, so that was um a little bit problematic. Some students came for a semester and with all the masking and restrictions decided it wasn’t for them or it wasn’t just a good fit—that definitely happened a lot with the freshman class of fall 2020/2021. What I can say is that particular class while we had a good a lot of freshman come in that year, a lot of those students left because the online learning environment wasn’t for them—so that really took out I would say actually more of the middle of the ensemble, if that kind of makes sense. A lot of the upper classmates' retention waivered like, “I’ll take a year and have a gap year and just sorta wait this out”. There were also students who you know just didn’t feel comfortable coming back and playing in person yet in fall 2021, and at that point it was really difficult to make accommodations— we just had to kind of go all in at that point. I do think there were a couple of people that were a little more hesitant to come back to the in-person environment after being online for a year. There were a lot of feelings and things that sort of contributed, so I don’t know if I can say the group was absolutely smaller or bigger, but it’s been about the same. The ratio of young students to older students I think has been a little bit different the last couple years GH: So kinda backtracking a bit—Thinking back to the early moments of COVID, how did Augsburg first react and what practices and rules were put in place right away for people to stay safe? 3 ES: That would have been March 2020, Augsburg moved everything online. It wasn’t without thought—that’s not what I’m saying— they just did it. There were a lot of schools around the country, and I remember as more and more big universities started canceling class and saying, “well our spring break is gonna be two weeks, now our spring breaks gonna be three weeks, okay now we’re online until the end of year”— so I feel like how Augsburg handled it initially was appropriate although it’s hard to say in hindsight what the best decision would be. Augsburg made a decision that we were online through the last five weeks—and actually the other thing that they did is they gave the faculty—it was actually two week spring break for students and the second week of the break was for faculty to have a week to transition their classes very last minute online. So that was the immediate response. Moving into that fall I remember being very anxious about what was going to be happening and felt uncertain. I think everyone was struggling to figure out what’s gonna be the best situation. Eventually when they figured out this hybrid course delivery that we gave for the main year of the pandemic, I think we all just had to adjust. From there I had to do a lot of imagining and troubleshooting of what band would be in that situation—so did I answer your question okay? GH: Yes. ES: Ok. GH: So you talked about the kind of troubleshooting you had to do, What did the band look like right when all those restrictions went in place? ES: I actually— it was such a weird time. We had just finished a big concert— our big concert of the semester. I felt great that we had been able to get that concert in before everything shut down, it was literally like the week before spring break so we just barely got it in. People were just beginning to talk about what the repercussions of this thing were going to be, and then it really snowballed. I felt like, “what am I gonna do for the band”, because the whole thing about band —I was teaching band, I was teaching an introduction to music class that wasn’t about making music but it was about learning about music and listening to music. That class was much easier to move online. Then I was teaching a music theory class as well and that class, with a little bit of technology, I was able to move that class online without too much. Band was absolutely the hardest one, no question. So it was challenging. The idea I had— and I will say I’ll give myself a little credit, I feel like I knocked it out of the park for what I had to deal with. What we did is we performed a piece on zoom and that piece is John Cage’s 4 minutes and 33 seconds. I know that there’s still an archive of that in our Music Department YouTube—have you seen that at all? GH: no I don’t think I have 4 ES: On the music department YouTube, there’s a video of it and basically I had the band attend a zoom meeting where we talked about this piece, John Cage’s 4 minutes and 33 seconds. For anybody who doesn’t know what that piece is about it’s basically organized silence. The music that we hear is sort of the sounds that we hear in the background, like somebody coughs, there’s a horn that goes off on the street in the background, somebody shuffles their feet, and this is often done in a concert hall but doesn’t need to be. It’s a really famous and sort of controversial and thought provoking piece of art, that really questions what is the nature of music— that’s kinda the point of the piece right?. John Cage is one of those important composers that’s really pushed some boundaries, so I thought of all the pieces that I can do this is the one. I thought that was actually a really good solution, so we talked about the piece. I had a four week plan and I just checked in with everyone—week two we talked about the piece and we planned it out, and week three we performed it. There were a lot of things that we started talking about, like how are we going to do this thing?. The students really came up with some great questions and some ideas like, “how do we actually perform over zoom?” and it was really interesting. Someone asked “well should we tune? Should we have our instruments?”. Everybody found some kind of instrument and they had it in the shot with them. They had to each pick where they were gonna be located, how they were going be framed in their little zoom square, and what the video shot of them was gonna be. They had to think about how to present themselves— somebody brought up like “should we tune?”and we decided we should tune because thats how we usually start concerts. I think we decided that I should take a bow at the end, so at the end I get up from my chair and I bow. We figured out how to time it, I as the conductor was timing it on my end and putting notes in the chat like “first movements done”—and so then what does that mean when a movement of the piece is done? I can’t remember if everybody muted for a minute so people could stretch and stand up, there was something like that. Then we started the second movement and then everybody turned their mics on and there were a couple people who had—like my percussionist,she was outside and all the sudden a snow storm started happening in her window, and Pearl I think her dog walked through the shot. Another student who was down in Texas at the time—it was sunny and gorgeous and all the sudden the microphone picked up the birds that were in the background of her square. It was exactly what we all needed at that moment because I think we needed— here we all were separated and so this was a chance for us to build some community, to be together and find solace in that. Also just to have this doable and cool art project that is relevant to our lives as musicians, so I think I knocked it out of the park. Then the summer happens and I’m like, “well I did the one cool thing, what am I gonna do next year?”. So then I had to come up with like a whole new set of plans for that following year. Would you like me to briefly talk about that? GH: Yeah, yeah ES: The following fall, we were in a hybrid modality which meant every class had to have an online option. What I did in both semesters is I had an in-person component that met once a 5 week, that students could opt into. So we played a couple of pieces, it was called Flexible Ensemble. It wasn’t for full instrumentation of a concert band it was for— if you have six people who play different things you can kinda make it work. I probably had that in the fall semester twenty students that wanted to do the in person thing, so we played these flexible ensemble pieces. We met outside of the band room, there’s an exterior door that leads to this sort of garden and patch of grass that I basically demanded that we be able to rehearse out there. So we rehearsed outside where it was safe, and we knew that was the safest situation—was to play outside. We ended up moving to the chapel when it got too cold, and we recorded our work for the semester. Each semester I had an in- person component that met once a week. For the virtual component, I had an option where students could do a listening project and then write a paper about it, I also had sort of a compare and contrast assignment, probably another listening assignment. I had an assignment where if students wanted to write program notes for a particular set of pieces they could do that. I had a project that was interesting where a group of seven of us basically wrote a piece of music together online, we met once a week and— it was a really kinda messy process but we ended up composing this piece, conceiving of it and writing a short two or three minutes. Each person then recorded their part on their instrument at home to a click track and then I edited those together into an actual recording of us all being separate but together, and so that was sort of the culmination of that project. That particular year was like nothing I had ever done before with the band, but it was very project based—it was the only way I could wrap my head around trying to have some option where you could be in person and play and then also if you weren’t comfortable with that to get some sort of learning— there’s probably like three other project that I didn’t even list, but it was all along those lines GH: Kind of shifting gears a little bit, I know that like the Music Department relies on a lot of donorship. How did that change during the pandemic? Was there a lot more donorship or was there less, if you can answer this? ES: David Meyers was our chair at that time, and he was really good at reaching out to donors and creating those connections and raising money for the Music Department. It’s hard for me to remember actual numbers, but I do know that for two years we did this—because we would have done this in spring 2020 and 2021, instead of having a recital in person we had some video clips of some of our students— I think we had to cobble it together a little more the first year. Every year we do a donor recital, so the first year there was a zoom meeting and we found video footage of at least three scholarship winners that we felt that we could share. We also had some of our alumni and donors talk, so we came up with a thirty minute presentation the first year, that was an alteration of talking about what we did and thanking the donors for what they’ve done, and then showing some of the students' work that we could show at that time. The second year when we knew that we were gonna be online and we had more time to prepare for it then, we did a forty five minute program—and I actually did quite a bit of video taping because we were back on campus at that point—how did that work it’s a little hard to remember—but we videotaped all 6 the scholarship auditions, and then from that we were able to pull and put together a video recital of all of that work, and edit it together and we showed that over a zoom meeting and sort of again alternated between talking to alumni and donors. As far as raising money, I’m a little out of that loop so I’m not sure I can comment on that specifically. But we did try to do what we could to acknowledge and thank our donor base during that time GH: You talked about your experience as a conductor, How did your experience being a professor differ from being a conductor? Like in the classroom vs the ensemble? ES: There’s different kinds of classes I do—I feel like I wear different hats, they're definitely related hats. It’s not like I’m a teacher in this class and a conductor in the other class, so it doesn’t quite work that way—but there are definitely some differences. The thing I noticed the most about the concert band was I felt very hindered by having to wear a mask when I conducted. I completely believed that I should be wearing a mask and that everybody should be taking care of each other, it really wasn’t a question of wearing one—it was more a frustration of not being able to be as expressive as I needed to be. Part of the job of being a conductor is to communicate non-verbally with the ensemble. Typically I do that a lot with my body language, with very specific timed gestures with my hands, but the most expressive part that is easiest to manipulate in a second is your face.Ways that I typically use my face are if somebody comes in for a solo does a great job, I like to give them a smile like “that sounds great!”. I’m not saying it, but I’m saying it with my face. Conversely if somebody misses an entrance or plays a wrong note I give them the stink eye, that’s part of the process—something is wrong, figure it out. I still did it but I also felt like I had to dial it up to one hundred to get anything across, I felt really hindered by that in that class in particular. The other class that I felt hindered by the mask is definitely the conducting class that I taught, which is for the same reason. Everybody’s face was covered up and it was hard to model those things and to also see what was happening. Eye contact is so important when you're in front of fifty people, to be able to look at somebody specifically or look up at everybody generally—so everybody knows she’s going to do something important, I need to clue them in on that. Those two classes were really challenging because of the mask use and I sort of mentioned some of the other things about bell covers and that kind of stuff—we got through with that stuff fine, it was just great to be making music in person again. That academic year, 2021, it just didn’t feel like the live music classes— they just felt so different and then coming back the following year started to feel correct again. GH: What would you say your biggest struggle was as a professor during the pandemic so far? ES: Biggest challenge? I definitely think some classes translate better to online learning than others. Live music classes, I’m pretty convinced, just do not work. I feel like I made them work as well as possible and I was just unsatisfied. So I think the biggest challenge for me was the summer before the academic year 2021, trying to figure out what am I even gonna do?—For the 7 concert band and conducting, “what am I even gonna do?” Everybody was figuring it out. There were a lot of online workshops that summer about “let’s share ideas! what are you doing?, how are you dealing with conducting?”. There were a lot of people who teach similar classes to me—and everybody was figuring out how we’re gonna handle it. The other thing that was tough about— sorry I’m gonna back up— the other thing that was really tough about wind and choir rehearsals in particular was that we really had to rehearse only for 30 min at a time, which is a huge hindrance because usually our rehearsals go one and a half to two hours minimum. We had to take what we called “air out” breaks which is a big disruption to what we were doing. We had to really plan around everybody leaving the room for 10 minutes and letting the aerosols disperse so—I got off track, what was this question? GH: What was your biggest challenge? ES: I think the biggest challenge was figuring out how to make band revenant online, and I sort of did the best I could and concluded that it sucks. So I'm happy to not be doing that anymore. GH: One thing that I would really like to learn about is, what was the sense of community like in the ensemble during covid? I was in some ensembles, and for me the community was not good, so what was it like here at augsburg? ES: Community is a big one, I would say this true of the music department in general. In 2021, that was a huge challenge and I would say that it was department wide and not necessarily just the ensembles. The ensembles are where we get together, so that was really tough. I think it was the toughest for the freshman class coming in, everybody else sort of knew each other in band and I think that’s a big part of why people come back to ensemble— they like meeting with that group of people, they like making music too but there’s a social aspect to it that you can’t dismiss, right?. People like to come and see this group of people and work with them. In retrospect I probably didn’t do enough to try to build that community, but I just didn’t have a lot of good solutions. I think there were a few times in the music department that we tried to meet, especially the freshman theory class. We tried to meet in person very occasionally for some particular activities that made sense. I know that Rafael did some specific things with the Augsem section, there was something there, it was really challenging. I think in retrospect I didn’t do enough but I also was just trying to hold it together and make class happen. I will say one thing that I did do is we managed to at the end of the school year in April during finals week, I did have an in-person gathering for all of my classes. I bought a bunch of snacks, I set up tables outside the band room and I said “please come have a snack, let’s say hi to each other”. I might have done that one or two other times like during the school year. I would never want to force anyone to come into a situation where they were feeling unsafe, so I tried to create a couple of times where we had safe situations where we could just socialize. But beyond that it was really challenging and I think that freshman class really bore the brunt of that unfortunately. 8 GH: Another thing I also wanted to know about was when you went back to concerts in the fall—firstly when did you go back to concerts?, secondly what protocols were in place since it was hard with brass and wind instruments to utilize that? ES: One of the things the university did was,—this would have been fall 2021, one thing the university did was they had a mask mandate in place.I can’t remember if it was a statewide mandate—there were so many rules at different levels—but Augsburg had a mask mandate in place, so that made my job actually really easy. That meant we had to have a playing mask that had some sort of opening or slit or way that you can interact with your mouth piece appropriately, and you have to have that mask as well as your sort of regular mask on. That part was actually pretty easy, I was able to tell the students “you gotta take one of your masks and you gotta cut a hole in it and you gotta figure it out, and they were like okay”.We then bought a bunch of bell covers, so all the wind players had bell covers we also were able to—we were a little smaller but one of the benefits of being smaller was we could have spacing that was three feet apart. They actually had recommendations the previous year that people should be seated six feet apart so that they wouldn’t share as much air with other people. We also had the air purifiers running, we took air out breaks, we had a 30 min rehearsal period where we had to take a ten minute break. Somehow I worked this all out so we could take one break in the middle of class, somehow that all worked out. One of the things I did was because I had an exterior door, I would open the door— we’d open the doors to the hallways and then we’d have this big breeze that would just circulate air in from the outside. The university really tried to up the amount of air circulation in all of the buildings so that was another thing that was good. I bought hand sanitizer just for the percussion section, so they could have it back there since they were sharing equipment, so that was for rehearsals. For concerts we did pretty much all the same things, we sat farther apart, the audience had a mask requirement—I think it was if you want to come to the concert you gotta be masked up. So we did that, we sat a little more distanced and we just wore masks—I mean that’s what it was and bell covers, so it wasn’t really that much different we just had to worry about the stuff coming out the end of our horns. GH: Since the pandemic, classes changed a lot and they were shifting online and everything. Are there any of these changes that you have kept today in your coursework or that you utilize? ES: Before the pandemic—I’m pretty intense in rehearsal. You're smiling because you’ve been in rehearsals with intense conductors, you know what I’m talking about. I can rehearse for like two to three hours without a break, I don’t need a break I just go. But not everybody is like me, people need breaks. So I think the thing that I noticed that I kept from the pandemic is— even though I was super irritated that I had to take this ten minute air out break, what I found was all the students would go into the hall and they would all talk to each other and they knew each other better than in pretty much any previous year, and it’s because we had this ten minutes break 9 where everybody had to go out in the hallway and chill. And the social aspect and community building part of that was really great.I had to go out there too and I could check in with different groups and some folks would go outside for a little while—they’d line the hallways, some of them would check their phones.They all knew each other a lot better because they had this ten minute break where they just couldn’t be in the room. So I kept the break so now in the middle of my ninety minute rehearsal I usually have a five minute break where people can stand and stretch and they can visit with somebody, or they can leave the room, or they can check their phone. I’m a little sad, I could use that 5 minutes of rehearsal— but I do know that they really appreciate having just that little bit of time to say something to somebody across the room. At the beginning of the year I tried to especially encourage my upperclassman to meet all the freshmans, so I could count on that time to do that as well. I have found that it has been a community builder for me to put a break in the middle of the rehearsal period, even though I hate losing those five minutes deep down inside. GH: Now kind of shifting gears, what I would really like to talk about is your composing and that part of your career, and how that was impacted through the pandemic. ES: I had a bunch of premiers—I’ll talk about a few things. I had a bunch of premieres that were supposed to happen in May 2020, so that all got delayed indefinitely. I had at least three pieces, that were supposed to have premiers in May 2020, they all got delayed— they have all happened at this point. I was super bummed that those pieces weren’t gonna get played, but who was gonna hear them—so that was a little bit of a bummer. I will also say I had some challenges with—I have this sort of theory about how much creative energy I have as a person—so I don’t know if you can relate to this but I feel like I’ve got a few hours a day of like really great thinking, high level thought creative energy that I need to compose music. I’m getting better at expanding that but all of that energy was used up trying to figure out how to hold an online band. It was really challenging and so I suppose the benefit to a lot of ensembles not meeting in the classroom in normal mode was I did have to ask for some extensions. One group I had said “you can push that deadline back we’re not meeting this year”—which was great because I can't even figure out how to teach my class, so all of my thinking had to go into how to teach a class in a whole different way, in a way that you can’t even imagine ever having to do—that took all my mental energy. I had two pieces I had to delay and ask extensions on, it ended up being fine and everybody understood—but I also felt sort of frustrated with not being able to have the creative energy that I felt like I should, but I sort of realized later that I was putting it in other places. The other thing that I did do, which for me takes less creative energy, is I did arrangements of a couple of pieces that I’d already composed and I made them available for what’s called flexible or adaptable instrumentation. I had a couple of pieces that I sort of put out into the world—a lot of composers were doing this, taking something they’d already composed and making it available for a selection of random instruments—it’s basically what I call file prep. Sort of rearranging and prepping all the PDF files and then you put it on your website. The work I did 10 was more like rearranging for pandemic purposes, and so some of those pieces still get played although not as much. People have gone back to programming more of my full band stuff at this point. But they're still out there and they still get used occasionally. GH: Going off that, how did your commission side get impacted by covid? Did you get more, less? ES: It seemed to be about the same, I don’t think that necessarily was too affected by the pandemic. Everybody was planning for when they could get started again and because the commission cycle usually takes one to two years anyway, I think everybody was excited like, “let’s do this, we’re gonna look forward to when we can get back to it”. I think it was about the same amount of work that I was being offered at the time, and I think that has recently increased but I don’t think it has to do necessarily with— maybe it does, I don’t know. It’s increased recently but I also think part of that is my music is out there more, so that’s gonna continue to grow. So I felt like it was about the same, I don’t know if that was necessarily impacted. GH: Thinking back to the pre-pandemic world, and as we slowly enter the post-pandemic world— when you think of Augsburg as a whole do you feel a change in the University among students or just a different feeling overall? ES: Yes, I have. I was just thinking about this yesterday not thinking you were gonna ask me about this specifically. At least here in the music building, I remember coming in around 9:30 on a Monday, and usually pre pandemic it seems like a time of day that this building would be hopping. People would be having class, I’d hear stuff happening in the practice rooms, people would be giving lessons and at least in this building—because I don’t think I can speak for the campus as a whole, I sort of live here if that makes sense. It feels like people aren’t quite coming back to being in person in as many things as they used to, and so there are a lot of times where the building feels kinda empty to me and I can’t really put my finger on why exactly. I know there were some classes last year that were still sort of hybrid or online, or there are more professors who are recording their lectures or are cool if people need to zoom in, and still doing the hybrid thing option for if you're sick. I don’t know if you’ve found that it feels a little different, I would also say I’m less likely to leave this building than I used to be. I don’t eat lunch at the commons as much anymore because it was closed for a while, I don’t go to the bagel place anymore because it was just shut down— so I sort of had a year of not buying bagels so now I don’t buy bagels which is kinda a bummer. So that’s how it feels different to me, I’m not sure about the rest of the campus but it feels slower and quieter to me. Do you feel that, what do you think? GH: Yeah I agree. The building here just feels really dead a lot of the time. 11 ES: It feels different. Class passing time feels different, there’s less hubbub as people are going back and forth to classes. I remember it was chaos around here for ten minutes every hour and half or whatever it is. I sort of miss that. I guess the benefit is there’s a lot of times where you don’t need to be on campus. If you’ve got just one or two students in an office hour you can zoom in so then you don’t need to come in to do that necessarily. There’s a lot more acceptance of being able to occasionally move your class online if you need to, or record a lecture because your gone that day— that’s something I never would have thought of before the pandemic and now if I know I’m gonna be absent due to a personal appearance or some other thing I have going on, I record my presentation. I just toss it up there and say, “this is class for this one day and then I’ll see you the next class period”. I think there’s a lot more of that happening so I think that affects some stuff. I don’t know exactly what the numbers are, but it does feel different. GH: Having gone through this whole struggle of the pandemic, are there any parts that you find are rewarding in any way? ES: I have some fuzzy feelings about that John Cage piece that we did. I think it hit the right note of some social bonding and comeseration, but also learning something about a piece that those students probably didn’t know—I have some fuzzy feelings about that. There are definitely some warm and fuzzy feelings about coming back in the fall of 2021, despite all the challenges that I mentioned before about masks, bell covers, and rehearsing 30 minutes at a time. I remember feeling like, it is what it is, so being appreciative—I had some feelings about that. What was the question again? I feel like I’m tangenting. GH: Was it rewarding in any way? ES: Rewarding, yeah. It was rewarding despite all the energy it took to troubleshoot. I did get some satisfaction out of that process if that kind of makes sense. It also made me appreciate the job that I do and the interaction I have with students more. I think that’s maybe what I took away from it. GH: My final question is where do you see your work going from here? For your classes and ensembles, do you have any goals for the future coming out of this pandemic and finally being able to do everything again? ES: I feel like, lesson learned. I really appreciate my job and I think it was an eye opener for everybody. We need live music, we need live theater, we need live performing arts, right? We can’t take that for granted, we need that as a society—that’s just what it is. And I think, just continue to grow and build the community in the Augsburg Music Department and the Concert Band, and I’m going to keep writing. Just actually knowing that challenges can be overcome—so 12 there is something about coming out stronger on the other side, there’s something about that too. Hopefully that answered your question. GH: Yeah, Thank you so much for meeting with me! ES: Yeah, you're so welcome! GH: And again, that was Dr. Erika Savnoe in discussing the impact of COVID-19 on Augsburg University’s Music Department and Concert Band.
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