“The version of the relief package that passed unanimously in the Senate on Wednesday … will offer both expanded unemployment insurance and direct payments to millions of Americans affected by the coronavirus pandemic, in addition to the usual more or less unavoidable carve-outs for finance and other business interests,” writes Matthew Walther in Saturday’s (3/28) The Week. “Classical music is just as important in Cincinnati and Kalamazoo as it is in Washington…. This is why recent efforts like the … the ‘Bedtime With Bach’ series put on by the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra are so heartening. It is one thing to sit back and listen to one’s favorite performances in a vacuum; it is another to recognize that across the country there is a community of listeners who also understand the value of classical music … as a living heritage, something from which enormous pleasure and consolation is derived…. If it is worth bailing out restaurants and bars and other places where people congregate together for merriment and diversion, we must not neglect those institutions in which men and women come together for something that satisfies all the deepest longings of our species.”
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