I own a music school in Anchorage. We’ll be reopening to a new world.

There’s a very nice violin hanging on the wall behind me that hasn’t been played for weeks. Our waiting area is empty, and the piano keyboards in the studios along the hall are starting to gather dust. For 25 years, I’ve been in the business of providing music lessons, and the sudden silence is deafening.

Like a lot of other Alaska business owners, I’m being confronted with the question of whether I still have a business. Yes, it’s probably only another week or two before we’ll get the go-ahead to reopen. But I’m not sure we’re going to be reopening into the same world.

Music, for a long time, seemed to be a bulletproof industry. People had been making music since we first became people, and people would always be having kids who would also want to make music. After 10 years of teaching independently, I opened Alaska School of Music in Anchorage in 2005. I opened Valley School of Music in Wasilla in 2014, and expanded into Eagle River last summer.

But for several years the business hasn’t been growing. I’ve been opening more locations in search of fewer students. There’s been a slow but steady decline in enrollment since oil prices last crashed in 2016. Somehow, the loss of 16,000 jobs seemed to dampen enthusiasm for discretionary spending on things like music lessons. And that was before COVID-19. At least 60,000 more Alaskans have lost their jobs since March. Looking ahead to the loss of an entire year’s tourism and the impact of $12 oil (the state budget is built on $63), I’m starting to look back on 2016 as gold rush days.

As grim as the economy appears, I’m equally troubled by what’s happening in our culture. I’m confident that sales of beer and pizza will rebound pretty quickly, but it’s been clear for years that music is losing its place in modern life. For 20 years, we built our business by simply asking kids what songs they wanted to play and then teaching them how to play those. But the young kids we’re seeing lately are often unable to identify any song or any performer by name. To them, music is just something that streams from the ether. Radio stations and stereos are history, replaced by apps that know exactly what mom and dad want to hear and never stop playing it. Songs come and go with no mention of titles or artists. It’s pure background music, requiring no attention whatsoever.

As they become teenagers, a lot of kids do find themselves identifying strongly with particular styles and artists, but this is increasingly unlikely to be music that is actually played. It’s music that has been programmed. The computer is the predominant instrument in modern popular music, and why spend years learning the guitar or piano when you can generate a beat instantly on an iPhone? And so kids are indeed not learning them. Nationwide, piano sales have fallen by two-thirds in the past 15 years. Electric guitar sales have fallen by one-third in 10 years.

And for anyone who does want to learn an actual instrument, YouTube is waiting at their fingertips with tens of thousands of instructional videos, all free for the clicking. It’s a lot harder and slower to learn that way, but the idea of paying money to learn anything is something that occurs to very few teenagers. I know; I’ve got one. Her natural response to any impulse is to go clicking around the internet for free content. When I first started teaching guitar in the 1990s, it was rare for me to have a student younger than 12. My schedule was full of teenagers and young adults wanting to play classic rock and Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Today, I’m not sure we have a dozen teenagers in the whole school.

What we are left with are young children whose parents want them to experience being enriched by a real human being in real time. As I remind our teachers all the time, we are not in the information business, we’re in the relationship business. Information is available for free on the internet. Real human beings are not. Our value lies as much in remembering to ask about those kids’ new puppy and listening to them complain about their little brother as it does with any information we might then present.

But is this something that’s really valued anymore? And if it is, how many people can still afford it? I’d like to think that the recent weeks of digital dependence and limited social interaction might reawaken people to the importance of real human connections that can’t be established over FaceTime. Here in Alaska in particular, I’d like to think that we’ve been reawakened to our essential isolation and vulnerability, and that this might bring us somehow closer together.

For the answers to those questions, like so many others, I’m going to have to just wait and see. What I know for certain is that it has been more than seven weeks since I’ve gotten a single phone call or email from anyone interested in starting music lessons. And that what our teachers are hearing from a lot of parents is how much they enjoy not having to drive their kids to lessons now that we’re trying to deliver those online.

Like everyone else, we’ve had no choice but to try to get by with Zoom. Most parents rejected the idea outright, and so our revenue has fallen off a cliff. What we’re finding with the remaining students is that an online experience can serve for awhile as a placeholder for established relationships, but it does not serve at all to build trust and rapport with a child who’s just starting out. It’s clunky and artificial and a very poor substitute for the real thing.

Nevertheless, I have a suspicion that it’s going to remain the new normal even after the coronavirus. Banks, doctors, lawyers, accountants, insurance agents and many others are discovering that they can be functional from home. People are ordering online delivery from restaurants they’d never imagined offering that. And public schools are advising parents that online teaching might still be a necessity in the fall.

I try hard not to be a reflexive critic of technology. I think of my grandfather, who once had a bit of a reputation as an old-time fiddler around rural north Florida. He would play for barn dances with no amplification, sawing as hard as he could with only my grandmother to accompany him, beating time with sticks on his open strings. I try to imagine how he’d have viewed the deafening electric guitar that I devoted so much of my own youth to, and I’m not sure he’d have understood its appeal. And I know I’m as addicted to my iPhone as any teenager.

And so it might be that our future in fact lies with online lessons for those who can be satisfied with that. Or maybe we’ll give up the studios and have teachers drive to students’ homes, unloading three more pieces of commercial real estate onto a deteriorating market. We’ll try our best to adapt to whatever new reality presents itself, because we have no choice but to try.

But I do hope that this experience doesn’t end up having only reinforced our increasing tendency to isolate ourselves at home, alone with our devices. I’m going to miss that waiting area full of parents, talking and listening to one another’s kids scraping on those violins and banging on those keyboards.

To my ears, that was music.

David McCormick has been teaching music in Anchorage since 1994. He owns Alaska School of Music and Valley School of Music.

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