How did medieval people learn music? The answer was not confined to treatises or classrooms. Musical knowledge passed from voice to voice and instrument player to instrument player, through listening, imitation, gesture, repetition, and varied kinds of participation – in worship, ceremony, dance. Music, as we know, was preserved and reshaped in manuscripts, but was also embodied in performance, devotional practice, memory, and the daily routines of religious and educational communities.
These processes of musical learning have often been studied within separate regional and disciplinary traditions. Histories of music education in Latin Western Europe do not always enter into sustained conversation with scholarship on Russian, Ukrainian, Balkan, and other Slavic cultures. Yet bringing these traditions together raises productive questions:
How was musical knowledge made teachable?
What relationships connected theory with practice, written texts with oral transmission, and technical instruction with spiritual formation?
What can manuscripts, diagrams, rubrics, corrections, and performance traditions tell us about teaching as it actually occurred?
A hybrid session that I am helping to organize for the 2027 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo seeks papers addressing these questions.
Call for Papers
“Pedagogies of Sound: Medieval Music Education in Slavic and European Contexts” International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 13–15, 2027 Hybrid session
The
session explores music education across medieval and early modern
European and Slavic traditions, focusing on the transmission of musical
knowledge through pedagogy, performance, spirituality, and creative
practice.
Possible topics include theoretical instruction, chant
pedagogy, performance traditions, mystical and devotional approaches to
musical learning, manuscript culture, and the relationship between
theory and practice. We particularly welcome comparative and
cross-cultural perspectives connecting Western Europe with Russian,
Ukrainian, Balkan, and broader Slavic contexts.
The session comes at a
moment of renewed scholarly interest in premodern pedagogy, cultural
transmission, and global approaches to medieval studies. The forthcoming
Russian translation of Music Education in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance also points to growing international engagement with the
history of music education and creates an opportunity for broader
dialogue between Eastern and Western European scholarly traditions.
By
foregrounding Slavic and Russian-language perspectives alongside Latin
European materials, we hope to foster conversation across disciplinary,
regional, and linguistic boundaries. A designated translator will be
available to help facilitate discussion.
The
devout sister reading one of Thalbach’s fancier prayerbooks, OENB
11750, had her choice of several prayers after she received the
sacrament at mass. Five options are given, each with its own take on
what the sacrament actually meant. The first reflects on the act of
reception itself, the second draws on nature imagery, while the
remaining three turn toward Christological belief, the Trinity, and
thanksgiving to the Father.
(1) O dise empfengknus dess
Zartten waren Fronleichnus vnnd koſtharlichen bluotts
O this reception of the
tender, true Body and precious Blood of the Lord
(2) O Du ware speis der Engell O
Du/o wares himelbrot der Ellendenn Menschenn
O You true food of the
angels, O You, O true heavenly bread of wretched mankind
(3) HErr Jesu Christe Jch glaub
das Tich dich waren gott vnd menſch eim empfangen hab
Lord Jesus Christ, I believe
that I have truly received You, true God and man
(4) O Du Edle Driualtigkeit las
dir wolgefallen
O noble Trinity, be well
pleased
(5) Danckh dir millter Vatter.
Wurdiger herr vnd barmhertziger Gott
I thank You, gracious Father,
worthy Lord and merciful God
That
second prayer is why I’m here today. How lovely that the
experiential world of trees, sun, food and spiritual grace mingle
together in a meditative mix of high highs and low lows.
TEXT
(which starts with a 3-line drop cap initial):
O
Du ware speis der Engell O Dů
wares himelbrot der Ellendenn
Menschenn in der wüste des Jamerthals
O du Liechter glantz / der ewigen Clarenn
Súnnen O du hoher Cederbaúm, wie
hastu dich genaigt zu mir armes würmlin,
Nur
beger ich von allem himlischen heer,
Das
si mir Gott helffenn bitten dancken,
der groſen gnad die gott mit mir armē ſinder
gewurckt hat. Amen.
O
You true food of the angels,
O
You, true bread of heaven for wretched
people in the wilderness
of the valley of sorrow,
O You bright radiance of the eternal,
clear Sun,
O
You tall cedar tree, how
have You inclined Yourself to me, a
poor worm?
I only desire of all the heavenly host
that they
help me to pray and give thanks to God
for
the great grace that God has bestowed upon me,
a
poor sinner. Amen.
Having
received the sacrament, the food is both tangible and spiritual; a
miracle and a metaphor. Christ is the food of the angels, heavenly
sustenance provided through sacramental miracle to the wretched here
on earth. People, in contrast to angels, are wretched: they are in
valleys, in shade or darkness, in wildernesses. The sacrament,
however, reminds the devotee of the “eternal clear sun,” moving
her attention from shade to the strength of the towering tree.
And,
of course, that tall cedar tree of mid-prayer calls on biblical
resonances. Tall, sweet-smelling, beautiful, strong: the tree is a
building material, the stuff of temples and noble dwellings, an
adornment along river banks, the wealth of nature that can be evoked
as landscape. Here, the sacrament as cedar “inclines” toward the
penitent whose salvation comes from Christ’s sacrifice on a wooden
cross. The body bent, the tree “inclined”: the prayer is
curiously evoking the imperviousness of cedar wood to the “worm,”
poor worm, who is also the speaker herself, seeking salvation. I
think there’s likely a resonance of the voluntary nature of the
passion here: Christ accepted the need of sacrifice to save the very
essence of the poor. He “leans in” to support and to salvage the
struggling “worm” of humanity. The prayer’s opposites -- food
and wilderness, shade and radiance, wood and worm – swing us back
and forth from grace to undeservingness and back.
The
prayer shifts at this junction, however, and the angels who have
dwelt naturally with Christ’s heavenly substance are asked to
support those for whom he chose the sacrificial path. The very angels
of the start of the prayer who live in a higher realm are to join the
devotee in giving thanks to God for the gift of grace.
This
is an attractive set of nature images – a rich image-bank for the
communicant as she considers the sacramental experience from multiple
angles. Thus, it’s hardly a surprise that the prayer was not
peculiar to Thalbach; it crops up in a variety of sources. This
prayer belongs to a known complex of companion texts, an array of a
dozen prayers that have interlinking concordances. What becomes
interesting in comparison is not (just) that the complex exists (see
HAIMERL or KORNRUMPF), but how it works. Curiously, its constituent
members vary, but the internal order for the complex remains
strikingly stable. Haimerl noted the presence of the complex in 1952,
but his presentation – a dense listing of prayer incipits relegated
to footnotes – disguises its organizational logic. To my eye, there
is a marked stability-with-variability that characterizes this set of
post-sacrament prayers.
The
full set typically starts with prayers of preparation, the devotee
readying him- or herself for communion. For instance:
“O
Milter guttiger Herre Ihesu christe. Ich pin nicht wirdig das ich
heiß dein kint oder creatur. Vnd das du eingeest In mein hawß” --
O gracious, kind Lord Jesus Christ, I am not worthy to be called Your
child or creature, nor for You to enter my house...(quoted here from
its Cgm 127 instance).
The
question of spiritual need and the common trope of unworthiness that
is nevertheless redeemed in the act is rehearsed and reinforced.
There is then a procedural gap in prayer as the devotee becomes the
communicant, and the set picks up with what we will take as our
focus, they prayers designated for “after taking the sacrament,”
typically highlighted through rubric.
Here
is where the patterning shows the adaptability of manuscript copying.
Across half-a-dozen manuscripts which share a concordance with the
Thalbach prayer, we see a range of solutions for “what to include,”
showing that the prayers are not actually circulating as a fixed
suite. No surviving complex contains every option, and the individual
collections vary in length and selection. But all of them operate
under the same idea-logic, as shown in the markedly stable
performative sequence that emerges.
Ordered listing of prayers after sacrament from six 15th-16th c prayerbooks; blank cells are for alignment
That
is to say: these prayers may not come as a completed unit, but
neither are they arranged randomly. Comparison
shows that this complex works less like a fixed textual cycle than
like an ordered repertoire. Across the witnesses, they appear in a
remarkably stable performative
order: praise and reception come first; prayers reflecting on the meaning of
the Eucharist follow; belief and a specifically Trinitarian address
come next; thanksgiving follows reflection
and affirmation; petition
comes afterward; and Marian intercession, when present, comes last.
Individual books can omit stages, but they do not jumble them.
The
comparison therefore suggests something more sophisticated than
either a single transmitted prayer cycle or a loose anthology. These
texts circulated as a repertoire
of possible devotional actions,
with an understood sequence even when only some of its parts were
selected. A compiler could expand or contract the sequence, but its
basic choreography remained recognizable. One
might
move directly from reception
to the “true food of the angels” prayer, then to belief, Trinity,
and thanksgiving, as in the Thalbach manuscript. Another might add
praise before reception, or petitions and Marian prayer afterward.
What remains stable is not the membership of the group but its
devotional logic. The complex functions not as a fixed cycle, but as a flexible repertoire
whose devotional order remains stable even as compilers shorten,
extend, and reshape it.
That
matters for understanding the five prayers in ÖNB 11750. They are
presented as choices (“Ein anders schon gebet”: another beautiful
prayer) , but they are not merely five interchangeable reflections
after Communion. Together they occupy successive positions within a
broader pattern of Eucharistic devotion: first the communicant
receives, then interprets what has happened, articulates belief,
turns toward the Trinity, and gives her thanks. The Thalbach
compiler, in other words, has produced a compact version of a much
larger devotional choreography.
And
the “true food of the angels” prayer sits at a particularly
stable point within that choreography. It appears in every complex in
the comparison, always after reception or an equivalent preparatory
opening and before thanksgiving or petition. Its imagery of food,
sun, cedar, worm, grace, and heavenly assistance grounds the devotee
in a succession of images. In so doing, it helps the communicant
dwell on the disproportion at the heart of the sacrament: heavenly
food given to the wretched, radiance entering a valley, lofty cedar
bending toward the worm.
Perhaps
that explains this prayer’s stability amidst the variability of
this complex of post-communion prayers. It is retained for the job
that it does, for its work of centering spiritual experience in an
observable view of everyday landscape. And, if the prayer gives the
communicant a landscape in which to understand the sacrament, the
prayerbook gives her a path through it.
And
that is today’s take-away. A prayerbook does more than preserve
words. It gives shape to the communicant’s movement through the
sacrament, using a widely shared devotional grammar to create a
particular path through the experience.
OENB
Cod. 11750, fol. 28r: an ornate Thalbach prayerbook from the late
16th century; the prayers for after the sacrament come
after an array of preparation *for* the sacrament. More details
available from the author as needed.
Cgm
127, dated 1476 and likely for the Nuremberg St Katharinakloster,
where, as Haimerl points out, it fits in a larger cycle of communion
prayers by Heinrich Seuse and the so-called “St Bernhard’s
Cursus” (Franz Xavier HAIMERL, Mittelalterliche Frömmigkeit im
Spiegel der Gebetbuchliteratur Süddeutschlands, Münchener
Theologische Studien I, 4 (München 1952), p. 48 n247).
Cgm
165, dated 1510,, copied by M. R. (see fol. 318r), and belonged to
“Dienerin” Elisabeth Röbin (HAIMERL p. 53 n267). Here again it,
as Haimerl explains, Suso’s communion prayer is included in a
larger group of prayers that closely matches the corresponding group
in the other manuscript and serves the same purpose.
Augsburg, Cod. III.1.8º 6, fol. 159v–160v , discussed
in Karin SCHNEIDER, Die Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek
Augsburg; Reihe 2: Die deutschen Handschriften; Bd. 1: Deutsche
mittelalterliche Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg:
die Siganturengruppen Cod. I. 3 und Cod. III. 1 (Wiesbaden: Otto
Harrassowitz 1988)
Once upon a time five days ago, we were all learning a lot about hantavirus.
Of course, five days is not enough time to know something deeply. It is barely enough time for a news story to become recognizable. But it is more than enough time for a word to become searchable, alarming, singable, misheard, politicized, mocked, explained, and folded into pandemic memory.
So here we are in early May 2026, when hantavirus – we hope briefly! – became a live global news event. The immediate story centered on the MV Hondius, a cruise ship (yes, another cruise ship story) associated with an outbreak of the Andes strain of hantavirus. News stories breathlessly explored the deaths, the quarantines, the returning passengers, the national health agencies, the question of person-to-person transmission, and the repeated official reassurance that this was not another COVID-style pandemic. The public risk, experts said again and again, was low. But “low risk” is not the same thing as low affect. After COVID, outbreak language does not arrive neutrally. It comes already charged.
That charge can be seen in the data. Google Trends suggests that searches for “hantavirus” peaked around May 7–8. GDELT’s global news-volume curve rose across the same window and stayed elevated. Nexis Uni, meanwhile, shows indexed news stories continuing to accumulate through Monday, May 11, when the count reached its highest point in my search, after a lull over the weekend. So the three timelines do not line up neatly. Public searching crested before the archive of news coverage did. On May 7, “hantavirus” was not yet a retrospective topic. It was a live search object.
SONG 1
That matters because May 7 was also the upload date for Jonathan Mann’s “Look Out For The Hantavirus,” part of his long-running Song A Day project. (16 years is stick-to-it power writ large!) The song does not explain hantavirus. It does not tell us what the Andes strain is, how transmission works, or what public-health officials recommend. Instead, it catches the unstable middle of the news event: after the story has become recognizable, before it has settled into explanatory prose.
Mann’s song turns the pathogen’s name into a sound-world. Hantavirus becomes “haunter,” “hunter,” and finally something like “huntavirus.” The slippage matters. This is not just a song about a disease. It is a song about being pursued by disease news. The virus is named, misnamed, and renamed; it becomes a thing that hunts and haunts. The lyric fragments “each day is a year” and “no more parties” do a great deal of work. They return us to pandemic time: days stretched out beyond recognition, ordinary gathering suspended, the future both overfull and stalled.
The song’s images also move quickly beyond the cruise ship. “Guns and bombs,” “sun,” “dust,” “dinosaurs,” and an “imperial junkyard” pull hantavirus into a wider field of catastrophe. That may be scientifically excessive, but it is affectively precise. Pandemic memory doesn’t live inside tidy epidemiological categories. It links all sorts of things: virus, climate, war, misinformation, environmental ruin, and the loss of ordinary sociability. This song catches the moment when a new virus does not have to become a pandemic to actually wind up sounding like one.
SONG 2
The next song I found took the opposite route. Ginger J’s “Covid-19 Part 2 (Hantavirus song),” posted May 8, is comic, sing-songy, and almost Tom Lehrer-ish in its boom-chuck momentum. It gives the story a jaunty explanation: ship, route, rat, virus, deaths, release of passengers, possible spread. Its hook is blunt: “Covid 19 part two.” That title is the entire interpretive mechanism. It does not wait to ask whether hantavirus is like COVID. It hears the news through COVID before the comparison can be medically corrected.
What makes the Ginger J song useful is that its comedy is not simply dismissive. It is the comedy of recognition. Cruise ship? Quarantine? Passengers allowed to leave? Possible global spread? People already dead? The song turns those details into a familiar little panic machine. The phrase “lockdown soon” is funny because it is (may it ever be so) disproportionate; it is also funny because it remembers how quickly the disproportionate became ordinary back in 2020. The song does not need to be epidemiologically fair in order to be historically revealing. It shows how quickly a new outbreak story reactivates old behavioral scripts. (For that more lighthearted (?) take, see also Putnam Pig https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/03/satire-sound-and-swine-2009-flu.html or the Flying Fish Sailors Satire, Sound, and Swine: The 2009 Flu Pandemic Goes (Musically) Viral)
SONG 3
By May 10, the story had entered a different register. The Story of Things uploaded “Hantavirus, They’re Not Telling You The Truth,” a LEGO rap that had gathered far more views than the other songs I found. This one begins as an explainer and becomes a conspiracy narrative. Its opening promises what the news supposedly withholds: “what’s actually behind it” and “what comes next.” The song moves from symptoms to mortality, from cruise ship to flights, from public-health reassurance to political accusation, and then into a wider architecture of hidden power.
This is where the news archive and the song archive start talking to each other. In my Nexis batch of news stories, 55 of 65 stories emphasized severity, death, hospitalization, or the lack of easy treatment. Forty-six carried reassurance as a major counter-frame: low risk, not COVID, not the next pandemic, do not panic. Thirty-two made explicit COVID or pandemic comparisons. This rap weaponizes precisely that gap between reassurance and history-that-bites. If officials say “low risk,” the song hears minimization. If experts say “not another COVID,” the song hears repetition. If the news explains, the song asks why the explanation is not enough.
The rap’s most revealing move is not that it becomes conspiratorial; that seems almost standard practice these days. No, it is that it makes conspiracy out of familiar pandemic ingredients: official statements, global travel, bodies on flights, absent vaccines, public-health infrastructure, political blame, and the suspicion that someone somewhere knows more than they said. Its refrain is epistemological: the problem is not only the virus, but the story around the virus. Who is telling it? Who refuses to tell it? Who profits from fear? Who gets to say “low risk”?
That is not my account of the outbreak, to be clear. It is the song’s account of mediated distrust. And that makes it inherently important. (I already mentioned Putnam Pig.) Pandemic culture did not produce only songs of comfort, solidarity, grief, and endurance. It also produced habits of suspicion. A new outbreak story, especially one involving a cruise ship, international travel, death, official reassurances, and no immediately available cure: we’ve got a hard-earned mechanism to hand to deal with that.
The echoes with COVID-19 are unmistakable. The rap’s most charged moments come when it treats official reassurance as repetition rather than information: “said don’t worry,” “said it’s fine,” “back in 2020.” That is where the song converts hantavirus into pandemic memory, textually and visually:
The issue is not only whether the Andes strain of hantavirus can spread between people, or whether passengers should have been quarantined longer, or whether the public risk really is low. The issue is that the phrases themselves have history. “Low risk” no longer sounds neutral; “don’t panic” no longer simply calms our fears. In the song’s logic, reassurance has become suspicious because it resembles earlier mistaken reassurances. The cruise ship, the scattered passengers, the absent vaccine, and the vulnerable lungs all become evidence in a larger story about institutions that fail, leaders who minimize, and publics across multiple continents being asked to trust too quickly. That makes the LEGO rap the darkest of the four examples: it shows how pandemic memory can become a hermeneutic of suspicion, turning every public-health statement into a possible cover story. It may not be medically true, but for many listeners, it is emotionally true. And that’s not a good thing.
SONG 4
The fourth song, Valtherion’s “Hantavirus: The Cruise Ship Killer Explained In A Song,” posted May 11, belongs to yet another mode: AI-assisted educational content. It’s my first knowingly consumed AI song, so let me dwell on this a moment. The channel is up-front about what it’s offering; the YouTube description announces that the music and vocals were generated using Suno AI, with audio and visuals also AI-generated, and that the facts were verified from CDC and WHO sources. This is not pandemic song as spontaneous response. It is pandemic song as content format: an explainer optimized for circulation, learning, and perhaps search.
Its title does a lot of work: “The Cruise Ship Killer Explained In A Song.” It promises drama and comprehension at once. The lyric fragments “No cure, no vaccine” and “know the science” make its double identity especially clear. It wants to be alarming enough to hold attention and responsible enough to count as educational. It turns the outbreak into a singable science brief.
That matters. Much of the news coverage did the same thing in prose. In the 65-story Nexis sample I reviewed, 61 stories functioned partly as mini-explainers. They defined hantavirus, described symptoms, explained transmission, named rodents, droppings, dust, lungs, kidneys, incubation periods, and risk. Sixty-three stories foregrounded rodents, dust, droppings, cleaning, or environmental exposure. Fifty-eight dealt with transmission uncertainty, especially the distinction between ordinary hantavirus transmission and the Andes strain’s capacity for person-to-person spread under conditions of close contact. The AI song does not depart from that archive. It condenses it into a content template.
The (problematic) news cycle and its song-based reflections
And then there is Jon Stewart. Love me some Jon Stewart.
The May 11 Daily Show segment is not one of the four songs, but it is too useful to ignore because he names the media structure that surrounds them. Stewart’s central joke is that hantavirus is not, in fact, the next COVID, but “try telling that to the news media.” The segment repeatedly stages a contest between expert reassurance and media panic. Experts say the public risk is low; the news asks whether this could be “the next pandemic.” Experts answer no, and yet the question returns, and returns again. The bit is funny because the loop is recognizable.
That loop also helps explain these songs. Mann catches the haunted atmosphere before it hardens. Ginger J turns the story into comic COVID déjà vu. The LEGO rap converts the reassurance/panic gap into conspiracy. Valtherion packages the outbreak as AI-assisted science education. Stewart then satirizes the very media system that makes all four responses legible: a system in which expert calm and headline panic can coexist indefinitely, each feeding the other.
The cruise ship is crucial here. News stories repeatedly made the MV Hondius into an outbreak-container: sealed, mobile, socially dense, nationally complicated, and easy to visualize. In my archive, 64 of 65 stories kept the cruise ship at the center. Sixty-two emphasized global movement: passengers, flights, ports, repatriations, returning travelers, national agencies. Forty-eight foregrounded quarantine, isolation, evacuation, docking, monitoring, or contact tracing. Even when the articles insisted that hantavirus was not COVID, the vocabulary revived COVID-era habits of reading. Who is exposed? Who can move? Who is isolated? Who decides? Who is reassured? Who remains afraid?
This is why the songs are not just a novelty response to a weird news story. They are small experiments in post-COVID hearing. They show what happens when a new outbreak enters a culture trained by pandemic experience to listen closely for signals of danger, denial, containment, mobility, and blame. We’re on heightened alert, and this news story -- in any format, from any media outlet -- delivers.
Of course, the four songs don’t agree with each other. Mann’s song is atmospheric and unstable. Ginger J’s is comic and immediate. The Story of Things is suspicious and accusatory. Valtherion is explanatory and machinic. But together, they form a tiny musical news cycle all their own: dread, joke, conspiracy, pedagogy. In less than a week, hantavirus passed from live-news object to singable object, from search term to content format.
To be honest, I do not think these songs tell us much about hantavirus as a disease. The news stories and public-health sources are better for that. But they do tell us a great deal about pandemic memory. They show that after COVID, outbreak news does not have to become pandemic reality in order to activate our latent pandemic feeling. A virus can be rare, contained, and low-risk to the general public, and still enter public imagination through the old portals: cruise ships, quarantine, no cure, no vaccine, passengers flying home, experts repeating themselves, news anchors asking whether we should panic, and people searching up scary terms late at night.
On May 7, hantavirus was not yet settled knowledge. It was still becoming a story. And that’s where music enters the interpretive field, explaining, expounding, riffing on the news of the day.
Because pandemic music does not only show us what people remembered. It also shows us how quickly those memories starts working again.
1) for a fast-moving news-and-music project, use GDELT for the shape of the media event and public search attention summaries; Nexis Uni for
the archival story set, and transcript tools for first-pass access to
video text. Use Google News and its ilk as little as humanly possible. Double emphasis on "humanly."
2)
To my jaundiced eye, the tool failure is part of the story: the same
information environment that makes outbreak news instantly searchable
also makes it harder to know what appeared when. There’s a reason that
Lego song got so many hits.
Tool assessment, or how I spent Tuesday morning:
To be honest, this morning project also turned into a useful test of research tools for very recent news stories. And I wasn't entirely happy with what I learned.
GDELT Summary was new to me and genuinely useful. It was slow, and it took some fiddling, but it gave me the best visual sense of when the hantavirus story “popped” globally. Its value was not in giving me a final archive, but in showing the shape of the news event: early rise, spike, sustained attention. It also surfaced related stories, including an earlier Taiwanese outbreak and reminders of spring cleaning protocols, that helped me see that the cruise-ship outbreak did not emerge from nowhere. This site also contains a snapshot of Google Trends, which was useful for a different question. Instead of “how many stories were published?” it answers “when did people search?” That distinction matters. Search interest peaked around May 7–8, while Nexis coverage continued to build into Monday, May 11. This helped me place Jonathan Mann’s May 7 song at the hinge between public curiosity and institutional narration. https://api.gdeltproject.org/api/v2/summary/summary
Nexis Uni, through Vanderbilt’s library subscription, was the most useful tool for building a clean story archive. It let me run day-by-day searches, count stories, download batches, and identify the recurring emphases that make this story special. It was not perfect, and the Monday peak almost certainly reflects weekend publication, syndication, and indexing patterns as well as actual public attention. But as a source for dated, citable news items, it worked. (subscription based; sorry, general user...)
Google News and regular Google Search were together the least useful tool on the block, and I no longer will recommend either for this kind of work. They no longer behave like a reliable date-linked news archive. Even with date-range searching and AI-mitigated practices (shift of browser or &udm=14), each surfaced recent AI-curated or misdated material as though it belonged to earlier points in the story. For scholarly or semi-scholarly reconstruction, that is catastrophic. Take-away: Google is not a trustworthy way to reconstruct a news cycle. (Here’s my data notebook assessment from Coffee-O’clock this morning on the two googles: “Date range constrained searches were functionally meaningless from a scholarly point of view.” Not gonna link because, bah.)
NoteGPT’s "free YouTube transcript generator" was quick, easy, and helpful. It was especially useful for grabbing rough text from the YouTube songs and comedy segment. Caveat: song lyrics and auto-transcribed texts still need checking by ear. Puns, repeated choruses, proper names, and sung words are exactly where transcript tools tend to wobble. (https://notegpt.io/)
Every so often, my brain likes to parse out the habits I live by as a set of small working principles. These aren’t grand philosophy, exactly, nor advice in any stern sense. They’re more like rules of thumb, tested out by daily practices: walking, writing, reading, birding before breakfast, coffee, and the recurring need to do the unlovely task before breakfast. Here are twenty of them.
1. A walk will make it better. 2. So will coffee. 3. Read it twice. You’ll notice different things the second time. 4. That applies to beloved fiction too. 5. Take joy in little things. Count the birds. Sample the cheese. Listen to the flowing water. 6. Sunrise is beautiful; go enjoy it. 7. Write early, write often. 8. Ask yourself questions. Sometimes, you’ll even have an answer. 9. Kiss the toad before breakfast – get that ugly task done and out of the way! 10. Not every bird in the flock is the same. It’s okay to be different. 11. Breathe. Pauses are productive. 12. Revel in delight. Momentary pleasures are the stuff of life! 13. It’s okay to do hard things. Just keep plugging away. 14. There’s wisdom in breadth. A different perspective might be just the thing. 15. Remember your thank-you’s. 16. Planning is its own pleasure. 17. Think of the possibilities. Act on them. 18. It’s more fun to have fun. Trudge only when necessary. 19. Surprises shouldn’t always be a surprise. The unexpected is a feature, not a bug. 20. Joys shared are doubled.
If you think about it, pandemic music is not always about remembering. Sometimes it is about not remembering. Or at least not staring straight at the thing that threatens to take over the entire field of vision.
In my last post on pandemic music, I wrote about “We Don’t Talk About COVID” as cultural amnesia set to music: a funny song about the strange collective work of not talking about the very thing everyone was living through. This post sits beside that one, but I wanted to shift the emphasis from forgetting to distraction.
Distraction has a bad reputation. We tend to treat it as avoidance, superficiality, scattered attention, or moral failure. But in pandemic culture, distraction can also be care. It can create connection across distance. It can give people a way to process fear without naming fear directly. It can make time pass. It can keep the mind from circling endlessly around death, exposure, testing, transmission, quarantine, hospitalization, and all the ordinary logistics of trying to live through a crisis.
That does not mean distraction is innocent. It can help people survive. But on the flip side, it can also help societies stop noticing what they have decided not to change. That double function is what makes pandemic music interesting to me.
Humor is a way of making contact
One of the great early-pandemic genres was the parody song. Not polished comedy, exactly. More like: a familiar song, a shared situation, a webcam, a kitchen, a window, a joke about toilet paper or quarantine hair or the sudden weirdness of homebound life.
Chris Mann’s “Hello (from the Inside),” an Adele parody, is such a good example because its joke is structurally simple. Everyone already knows the emotional architecture of Adele’s “Hello”: distance, longing, melodrama, the impossible reach across separation. The parody barely needs to do anything before the old emotional machinery starts running in a new key. “Hello from the inside” is funny because it is obvious, and it is obvious because everyone suddenly understood the inside as a shared condition.
That kind of humor depends on recognizability. The viewer needs to know the original song, but also the situation: the isolation, the screen-mediated social life, the newly theatrical domestic interior. The window is not just scenery. It is the pandemic stage.
The Kiffness’s “Tequila,” redone by saying “Corona” instead, works differently. It is almost aggressively minimal. How little does a parody need in order to become funny? Apparently, not much. A single word-substitution can be enough when the cultural context does the rest of the work.
This is one of the strange efficiencies of pandemic humor. A song can be very small because the shared world is doing so much of the setup.
Thank you to my students for surfacing these particular examples, but as most of us remember, such parodies exist by the hundreds, and were broadly circulated, and “good ones” got hundreds of thousands of views, if not always the millions of Shirley Șerban or the Marsh family’s take on “One Day More.” “One more day all on my phone; one more selfie of me glaring.” Indeed.
Humor helps process fear, but it does not remove it
There is a reason so many of these songs hover near anxiety. “My Corona Home,” “Anti-bacterial Girl,” “Stayin’ Inside,” “Quarantine” parodies (like this or this or this), TikTok dances, handwashing songs, and endlessly circulated musical jokes all belong to a world in which people were trying to keep fear at a livable distance.
Humor did not mean people were not afraid. It meant fear had found a social form.
That distinction matters. In a crisis, funny songs are not just relief from seriousness. They are one way seriousness becomes shareable. A joke makes the feeling portable. A parody turns a private panic into something one can send to a friend. “This is us,” the link says. Or, “I hate that this is us.” Or, “I cannot believe this is us, but here we are.”
That is why pandemic humor often feels both silly and documentary. The joke records the room. The joke captures the mood of the room. Sometimes the joke is the room: the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the inside of a house suddenly forced to contain school, work, exercise, entertainment, worship, boredom, fear, family life, and the news.
Boccaccio already knew this
None of this is as new as it felt.
The Decameron is one of the great literary monuments to plague distraction. Its frame is familiar: seven young women and three young men flee plague-stricken Florence and pass the time with stories, songs, dances, conversation, gardens, meals, and a carefully organized social world. Boccaccio’s young people are not pretending plague does not exist. The frame depends on plague. But within that frame, they build a life where the mind can do something other than remain fixed on sickness and death.
What strikes me now is how musical that life is. The frame does not merely say, “They told stories.” It gives us a world of canzonets sung for delectation, dances after meals, songs with instruments, walking, gardens, games, and the rituals of taking turns. Music appears not as a decorative extra, but as part of the structure by which a small group preserves itself.
One could describe that as escapism. But that seems too thin. It is also social regulation. It is affective hygiene. It is time management. It is community-making. It is a way of keeping fear from becoming the only available form of attention.
Read carefully, the pattern hard to miss: in the Decameron, entertainments outnumber explicit disease references. There are songs, dances, walks, instruments, prayers, games, and repeated gestures of sociability; plague is the enclosing condition, but not always the named content. The disaster is everywhere, which is precisely why it does not have to be mentioned every minute.
Medieval doctors also knew this, which is frankly unnerving
Medieval and early modern plague advice often recommended what we might now call mood management. Don’t dwell on death. Avoid melancholy. Seek pleasant company. Hear pleasant things. Spend time in gardens. Use songs, stories, and delightful things that bring comfort.
That advice can sound absurd from a modern medical perspective. Songs do not stop Yersinia pestis. Pleasant stories do not replace public health. But the underlying observation is not foolish: fear is not neutral. Attention is not neutral. Sound is not neutral. A world saturated with death bells, offices for the dead, sickbed reports, rumors, and morbid talk can become its own kind of environment.
When a fourteenth-century physician recommends songs and minstrelsy, he is not inventing Spotify’s “calm” playlists, exactly. But he is recognizing a problem modern listeners know very well: when the mind is trapped in a loop, sound can help change the loop.
During COVID, many people did something similar with the tools at hand. They made playlists for baking, cleaning, work-from-home, sleep, calm, sadness, and background companionship. They learned TikTok dances. They layered up sea shanties (or even better the Wellerman version with Kermit the Frog). They joined virtual ensembles. They watched people they did not know make music from bedrooms and kitchens and stairwells. The point was not always aesthetic excellence. Often the point was, simply, to make time habitable.
Distraction as musicking
Christopher Small’s idea of “musicking” is useful here because it shifts attention away from music as an object and toward music as relationship. Music is not only organized sound. It is also the people taking part, the social arrangements, the imagined relationships, the model of the world the performance proposes.
That helps explain why so many pandemic musical artifacts are not especially interesting if treated only as compositions. A TikTok dance with a parent in the kitchen is not analytically rich because of harmonic invention. Sea Shanty TikTok is not interesting only because of the tune. A virtual orchestra is not moving only because of repertoire.
They matter because of the relationships they stage.
A family learns a dance together. A stranger adds a bass line to another stranger’s melody. Cellists clap three times to synchronize their separate rooms into one performance. A parody singer turns isolation into a joke thousands of people recognize. A country singer names what it feels like to be “six feet apart.” A joke song about quarantine becomes a tiny public square.
Distraction, in this sense, is not solitary. Even when it happens alone, it imagines a set of relationships.
Comfort, memory, and the danger of moving on
But here is the problem: the same musical forms that help people endure crisis can also help them move past it too quickly.
That was the tension in “We Don’t Talk About COVID.” The song was funny because it captured exactly how adaptation felt from the inside. But it was unsettling because adaptation also meant normalization. Half the school has COVID, so pack the lunch. Guidelines changed, so keep moving. Exposure became ordinary. Confusion became ordinary. The song made that weirdness audible.
Distraction songs can do something similar. They help us survive the immediate moment, but they may also document the moment when survival quietly becomes “normal.” Baking playlists. Cleaning playlists. Work-from-home playlists. Family dances. Sea shanties. Quarantine parody. These are not trivial artifacts. They show how quickly people began building livable routines inside unlivable conditions.
That is not a criticism. It may even be the most human thing about them. I don’t know about you, but distraction songs were certainly part of my email economy during the height of “safer at home.” And I looked forward to them, and even contributed to a Pomona College glee-club reunion Danny Boy. (Nostalgia for Covid quarantine, now that’s a weirdness!)
But it is worth asking what happened to those routines afterward. Did they become memory? Nostalgia? Embarrassment? Digital clutter? Evidence? Did they help us process what we were living through, or did they help us defer processing it?
The joke is also an archive
One reason I keep circling pandemic humor is that it preserves things official records do not. Public health documents tell us about policies, recommendations, mortality, testing, quarantine, and institutional response. Parody songs tell us how those policies felt in the kitchen.
They record the absurdity of insufficient information. They record the pressure to remain cheerful. They record the mismatch between official guidance and lived reality. They record the shrinking of the world to a house, a screen, a delivery box, a phone notification, a playlist, a meme, a family video, a familiar song rewritten for unfamiliar circumstances.
This is also why pandemic humor should not be dismissed as mere distraction. “Mere” is doing too much work there. Distraction may be one of the ways in which a culture documents crisis without becoming overwhelmed by it. The joke allows us to approach the scary thing. The parody creates sufficient distance. The borrowed tune holds the feeling steady long enough to look at it.
Or, to put it another way: sometimes the way we avoid looking directly at something becomes the best evidence of what we could not bear to see.
What distraction knows
Pandemic distraction knows that fear is exhausting.
It knows that people need rhythm, repetition, jokes, songs, stories, dances, gardens, windows, screens, and other people.
It knows that the mind cannot live indefinitely at the pitch of emergency.
It knows that music is not always memorial, protest, worship, or art. Sometimes music is a pressure valve. Sometimes it is a bridge. Sometimes it is the thing you send to someone else because you cannot quite say, “I am scared,” but you can say, “This made me laugh.”
That does not make it less serious. It may make it more so.
Because in the end, pandemic music does not only show us what people remembered. It also shows us how they got through the long, liminal hours in the shade of crisis.
Some examples of medieval medical advice in the face of plague:
Listen to "songs, stories, and melodies" (Anon 5: 390)
Listen to "comforting talk, pleasing songs, and sweetly harmonious sounds"; (Anon 6: 322, 336)
“Hear pleasant things and attractive stories” (Giovanni di Donde, ca. 1350)
“…make use of songs and minstrelsy and other pleasurable tales without tiring yourselves out, and all the delightful things that bring anyone comfort…” (Tommaso di Dino del Garbo, d. 1370)
“Let us rejoice and delight in melodies, songs, stories and similar delights.“ (Salamanca, 1515)
If you think about it, the 2020 pandemic
gave us a rare opportunity to watch cultural amnesia in action. What
was a moment of total shut-down in one season became, almost
unbelievably, an “eh, meh, keep going” in another.
Kim and Penn Holderness combined that
seeming illogic in “We don’t talk about COVID,” based on the
rampaging hit from Encanto. It’s
one of my favorite pandemic artifacts, part musical parody,
part documentary. The video layers six tracks of self-harmonized
vocals (including the cheek-popping “bongo” slap-track),
interspersed with conversational fragments that are just as revealing
as the lyrics themselves.
What
they’re documenting isn’t just confusion; it’s adaptation. Or
maybe something stranger.
Kim: “Half
the school has COVID.”
Penn: “So I guess we’re just
sending them to school?”
Kim: “That’s what it says.”
Penn - “So
I guess that's what we're doing.”
That’s not denial, exactly. It’s not
ignorance either. It’s something like… functional forgetting.
The weirdness of living through it
Puzzling
and changeable guidelines, the loss of a million teststo poor inventory management,
worries about exposure, and the incredible numbers of repeat cases:
all of these are part of the pandemic experience.
And yet
you pack a lunch for your kids and send them off to school while
trying to manage the chat stream of who has come down with it.
Contagion has become an
everyday commonplace,
not something to react to.
The song captures that dissonance:
“We
don’t know how to act
’Cuz they say the strain’s not as
bad
So we just all kind of move along…”
There’s
a truth in that. The world blows up; we all just kind of move along.
Apparently, the
2020s are just that way.
Cultural
amnesia
as a historical force
Everyone
kept saying that we were living in unprecedented times, but actually,
there’s precedent floating out there.
After
the 1918 influenza pandemic—one of the deadliest events in modern
history—public memory faded with astonishing speed. Historians have
called it “America’s forgotten pandemic.” It
took a century—a CENTURY—for Philadelphia to memorialize the dead. (The outcome of that memorial initiative was lovely, though—go
listen to David Lang’s “Protect Yourself from Infectionm”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejY4xvJQxtU)
The
same thing happened, in a different way, during the Black Death.
Cultural production—music, manuscripts, daily routines—continued
with an eerie sense of continuity, as if the catastrophe could be
bracketed off from ordinary life.
Even
medical advice at the time went to the ostrich place: don’t dwell
on death, surround yourself with pleasant things, keep your mind
occupied.
In
other words, don’t talk about it.
What
we choose not to notice
Jenny
Odell writes that “patterns of attention—what we choose to notice
and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves.”
By
2022 (and even more so by 2024 and beyond), COVID didn’t disappear.
The data didn’t vanish. In fact, excess deaths and undercounted
mortality suggest the opposite—that the pandemic’s impact
remained both real and, in some ways, uncalculated.
What
changed was attention. Dashboards moved. Color codes softened.
Testing declined. The signals were still there, but harder—or less
socially necessary—to see.
We
adapted our perception in
a reversion to the mean.
We
wanted normal back. So we re-created normal.
The
mechanics of forgetting
It
turns out that there is
a
cluster of “amnesogenic practices”—ways cultures actively
produce forgetting:
Ignoring
(we stop talking about it)
Functional
replacement (we replace one meaning with another)
Hyperstimulation
(we fixate so intensely that meaning collapses)
To
my eye, “We
don’t talk about COVID” actually employ all three amnesogenic practices at once. Working
backwards through the list, I find the song to be a kind of
hyperstimulation—fast, funny, and dense with references and knowing
“a-ha” moments. Its narrative shows functional replacement in
action: COVID shifts from existential threat to background condition;
it has been reclassified as the new normal. And, of course, the song
refrain is all about silence. Our complicit, somewhat bewildered
silence.
Is
forgetting a problem?
Nietzsche
argued that forgetting isn’t just inevitable—it’s necessary. A
healthy individual (or culture) needs both memory and
the ability to let things recede.
There’s even an argument that
forgetting helps us function: it allows us to move forward, to act,
to live.
And you can hear that in the
Holdernesses’ closing conversation:
“We’re doing the best we
can… but isn’t it weird?”
It
is
weird. But it’s also survivable.
Nostalgia,
a so-weird nostalgia
What surprises me most, watching this
now, is the feeling it produces.
The upbeat tempo. The tight harmonies.
The shared confusion.
It’s… nostalgic.
Which is a strange thing to feel about a
global crisis that, in many ways, hasn’t cleanly ended. Long Covid
is still a thing; my students suffer from brain fog; we check the
wastewater measures regularly to decide whether or not we’re
comfortable eating out; we wear masks to concerts and the theatre,
and on and on and on.
In that way, 2022 seems cleaner. At that
point, we still had a working public health system that informed us
about Covid spikes, and it was considered okay to be Covid-cautious.
And it wasn’t the firehose of 2026, which has been, shall we just
call it “a period of higher crisis density.” And yes, we do still
have Covid and flu and brain-fog concerns—my
students were chatting about those things just yesterday. But we talk
as if Covid has gone away. No, we’ve just adapted to a higher level
of “background deaths.” This isn’t the post-pandemic I had
hoped for.
Talking about not talking
The song ends with a joke, but also with
a paradox:
“Our three-minute song about
not talking about COVID… that was about COVID.”
Maybe that’s where we are culturally.
We don’t talk about COVID.
Except sometimes, even now, we still do.
And when we do, it’s
often through humor, music, or fragments—forms that let us approach
the thing without fully confronting it.
Which might not be denial.
It
might just be how cultural memory works.
TRANSCRIPT: “We
don’t talk about COVID,” Holderness Family Music
(man
harmonizing) Kim - Hey did you see half the school has
COVID.
Penn - So I guess we're just sending them to school?
Kim
- That's what it says.
Penn - So I guess that's what we're
doing.
We don’t talk
about COVID, no no no
We don’t talk
about COVID, BUT
We were online
tonight (We were online tonight)
Saw that the cases
spiked
Like way off the
page, that seems wrong (That does seem so very wrong)
We don’t know how
to act
Cuz they say the
strain’s not as bad
So we just all kind
of move along (Should we really move along?)
Now we have zero
clue what’s next (What comes after Omicron?)
Where can you even
find a test? (In a warehouse in Florida)
And so I guess we
think it’s best (It’s the elephant in the room)
That we don’t talk
about COVID, no no no
We don’t talk
about COVID
So many debates
about vaxxin’ and maskin’
We just trying to
shorten how long this is lastin’
Never knew how good
we had it before (Shh shh)
And all the new
guidelines
Seem kinda puzzling
People don’t care
I don’t know if
that’s troubling
We are all trying
just to do the best we can
Isn’t everyone,
man?
Kim - We're doing
the best we can. But isn't is weird everybody's getting it but we're
like "Eh. Keep on moving"?
Six feet away, I was
talking to a dad
And now he has a
cold
And he’s coughing
really bad
We were outside, not
enclosed
But was I exposed?
Who knows?
We don’t talk
about COVID, no no no
We don’t talk
about COVID
Our friends went to
New York
The next day, COVID
Another friend has
not gone anywhere
But COVID detected
So many friends got
COVID last year
And they got it
again
I’m at the point
where I just don’t understand
C – D – C, they
told us recently
To shorten isolation
time
If ya not super sick
or you been on a ship
After 5 days I guess
you are fine
Then our kids went
to school
And I guess that
it’s all cool
Half their friends
are out sick
But they don’t
close the school
Like they used to do
They just kind of
don’t talk about it…
Kim - And
scene!
Penn - Yes.
Kim - So that's our song, our
three-minute song about not talking about COVID that was about
COVID.
Penn - But like we have to talk about this a little bit;
isn't it weird?
Kim - It is weird that in 2020 there was one
case in our county and we shut everything down.
Penn -
Right.
Kim - And then now, like most of the kids, like we're
getting just like blown up.
Penn - Everyday.
Kim - With
alerts from our kids' school about teachers and students that are
sick. And we're just like "We're gonna, okay, here's your lunch.
I guess we're just doing this".
Penn - And I guess the
vaccines help but it makes it easier to go there. But isn't it weird
how different.
Kim - And we're just not talking about it. And
we're just going on with life.
Penn – Under the rug. Kim - I get it,
look, I'm sick of talking about it.
Penn - Anyway, the moral of
this song is watch Encanto.
Kim - No.
Penn - It's really
good. Well, I'm just, sorry. Watch Encanto.
Kim - No, now you
sound like a white guy trying to say.
(popping)
Penn - I'm
gonna just. I'm gonna loop this.
Producer- Yeah, I was like "Do
we need to" (laughs).
Penn - No, it's starting to
hurt.
Producer- Yeah, like you're slapping yourself.
Penn -
But it does sound like bongos.
Producer - It does.
After hours and
hours immersed in the Very Long PrayerbookTM from the 16th
century that I’ll be speaking on at the Medieval Congress at
Kalamazoo this year, I thought a little leavening -- something that
WASN’T a description of lines (Curved? Straight? Red? Black?),
crosses (marginal, interlineal, in-line, red, black) and prayer
structures -- was in order. As yeast is to bread, so is poetry to the
brain, right?
So here’s to
Sunday’s completion of the (urrrrrrrrgh) 871-line data table, which
should provide me delights in the week to come.
For now, here’s a
glimpseofwhat’s been on my mind, translated into
end-of-work-cycle poetry:
LIMRICK
There once was a
scholar at work Who thought that her
scribe was a jerk:
She’d no sense of style
And her hand? simply vile
But still, to have data’s a perk!
CINQUAIN
Circles
Drawing the eye
Calling out what matters
Attending to the audible
Now mute
TANKA
End-of-line spaces;
Overlining weighty
words;
Rubrics and titles
She wants us to
understand And care for her
chosen prayers.
Back to the
prayerbook tomorrow. Today, though, the data table can rest -- and
so can I. Is that the garden I hear calling?
