The Hybrid Spaces of Sociability in the Musical Salon of Andrea Clearfield

From 1986 until March 2020, the salon of the Philadelphia-based pianist and composer Andrea Clearfield met in her home each month without fail. Then, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic began, and arts events around the world were abruptly canceled, as artists and audiences retreated to a state of solitude. In March 2020, Clearfield was forced to suspend her salon for the first time. Soon after, however, Clearfield’s gatherings resumed in another form. A group of friends, led by the music technologist and composer Adam Vidiksis and lead engineer Gerardo Razumney, together with a technical team of around ten volunteers, helped her to create an online, live, and interactive environment through the Zoom videoconferencing platform that would simulate some aspects of the salon that she had hosted in person for so many years. Clearfield then created hybrid gatherings that she dubbed “SZalons,” borrowing the “Z” from “Zoom” to distinguish them from her in-person salon events. While the online medium had some limitations, it opened new possibilities for Clearfield, her audiences, and the performers who present their work there. Through analysis of an interview with Clearfield and some of the hybrid performances that took place in the early days of the SZalon, this chapter suggests that Clearfield created the SZalon as a proactive, hopeful reaction to the overwhelmingly difficult circumstances of the COVID pandemic. Building on her existing network of musical sociability, Clearfield was able to use the Zoom platform to create a new geography of home that seeks to balance the intimacy of the salon with the quest for global connection through music.