Over the next few days, as I stayed home and spent too much time reading the news, it began to seem that the more people were separated and confused and scared, the more there was music. Yo-Yo Ma started posting performances with the hashtag #SongsOfComfort, and more than three million people watched him play Antonin Dvorak’s “Going Home.” The Metropolitan Opera in New York announced it would be streaming previously filmed performances every night free; hundreds of thousands watched. High school students who wouldn’t get to perform the spring musicals they’d been practicing started singing for Twitter instead. A Seattle musician named Marina Albero, who suddenly found all her gigs canceled and the schools where she teaches closed, started organizing what she called “The Quarantine Sessions,” streamed performances that would allow musicians to still play and audiences to still support them. (When I called her, she stressed that the money, while welcome, wasn’t the main point. “It’s about being together and making something beautiful,” she said. “Nobody is anything alone. That’s what this situation is demonstrating.”)

And from Italy, where a cascade of deaths in overwhelmed hospitals presaged what we feared our own crisis would become, video after video emerged of people in lockdown, standing on their balconies or leaning out their windows, uniting the music of their violins and tambourines and accordions and saxophones. They played patriotic tunes and folk songs. They played “Smoke on the Water” and “Tequila.” Elderly women stuck inside stepped onto their balconies and danced.

It took about an hour for the Seattle Symphony to perform Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D major. The symphony is a glorious jumble, rejected by its first audiences as too modern: It incorporates klezmer accents, folk-dance melodies, a funeral march and victorious horn crescendos. I kept waiting for the performance to feel solemn and historic, to get goosebumps of the kind I have when I read Brecht’s poem or think about people singing “There’ll Always Be an England” during the Blitz. But instead it felt like life, strange and confusing and funny and scary and beautiful, and still going on. In the chat box, people leaned into the surreality of the situation, making jokes about the rude noise of one another’s candy wrappers, about being tall and blocking other people’s views of the stage, about whether “clap” emojis are acceptable between movements, when real clapping, per symphony etiquette, is not. “Mahler is an absolute unit of a composer,” someone wrote; sex bots invaded the chat. People celebrated the music, told one another where they were watching from and wished one another health and luck and safety in a changed and scary world. White, the trumpet player, watched the chat from his own computer. “It was endearing and heartening,” he said. “But it was also reality.”

By the time it was over, nearly 90,000 people from Seattle and around the world had tuned in. By comparison, 4,835 people bought tickets for the original three-day run of the symphony, back in the other world that was last September. The symphony made plans for more shows: experimental solos filmed in homes or the empty hall; group pieces merged together electronically; more livestreams of past performances. I knew I would want to watch them. I wanted the deep breath, the feeling of connection, even the jokes about sex bots. I wanted the woodwinds making the soft sounds of nature and the brass section trumpeting victory, whatever that might mean now.