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One of the covid fallbacks my orchestra has in place is secret groups of musicians that quietly rehearse music you'll never hear in one of our concerts unless something goes wrong and a group has to be yanked due to infection/exposure. I'm in the secret group this week.
Our concerts already are planned so that the ensembles you see on stage have no crossover members, so if one group has to be yanked, it won't affect the other groups. And the secret group is kept entirely out of the main program - we even rehearse the week before everyone else.
If a group were to get pulled next week because someone suddenly came up with a fever or something, we'd get called in with as little as 24 hours notice and slipped into the program. But that hasn't happened yet, because our covid protocols and soft quarantines have been working.
It's actually a planning nightmare for the team of musicians and staff that put these concerts together, because not only are they scrambling to create concerts that utilize as many musicians as safely possible on a vastly accelerated timetable, now they ALSO have to make backups
And our poor librarians, who not only have to procure all the music, but also negotiate performance and broadcast rights for every piece with publishers who may or may not share our sense of urgency, are basically handling several times their normal workload without complaint.
Normally, a major orchestra's season is planned and locked several years in advance. We're now working a few weeks in advance, and sometimes far less than that, and doing it with a planning process that is far more collaborative (and therefore chaotic) than any other big US orch.
Anyway, I'm describing this because every now and then, you start to see some "they're a huge wealthy org why don't they just do x/y/z during the pandemic" takes, and that's very understandable, but these hugely complicated logistics are why.
But anyway, more importantly: secret group duty. Fuck yeah. See y'all onstage exactly never, probably.
