IMMUNITY | THE STRAD - INTERVIEW
Joshua Roman’s debut solo album and the healing power of music
October 2024
The title Immunity evokes music’s healing power, along with the sense of community he has developed through his special recitals addressed to other people coping with Long Covid. It brings together a widely varied array of pieces, mostly by contemporary composers (including by Roman).
Immunity contains some surprising choices and juxtapositions that represent ‘the music that’s been important to me on my journey with Long Covid so far’.
Roman spoke about how his understanding of his life as a musician has changed and what he hopes to communicate through his new album.
How does Immunity reflect what you’ve gone through?
Each piece on the album represents a moment or a concept that I worked through when I played the piece as relates to Long Covid. From April until the summer solstice the year it started, for example, I didn’t play the cello at all. The Bach Prelude from the Suite No. 1 that opens the album is the first music that I started playing again. Thankfully, my music memory has not been affected, even though other kinds of processing have been. Allison Loggins-Hull’s Stolen was the test piece, because it was the last thing that I had learnt before I got Covid. It’s also a piece that I had learned not only because I loved it, but because it offers a catharsis by taking us into a darkness and a depth that we don’t usually experience, but that music allows us to have. For me, music is not just relaxing. In fact, music is often not relaxing for me. It helps me work through things. That piece is a catharsis of sorts.
What message are you hoping to convey through the new album?
When I play for other Long Covid patients and share and develop this cathartic journey that they can relate to, it takes me to a vulnerable place and allows the other patients to go there as well. It’s about seeing that you don’t have to be who you were before to have a good life. The basic message is accepting that where you are doesn’t mean you have to give up on yourself or on life.
As a perfectionist, I put off doing an album for so long because I held onto this abstract, unattainable ideal, but the album is me finally saying: This matters enough for me to put this music out.
Also, the album covers a wide ground and represents a snapshot of my view. It’s not the whole view, but these pieces fit together. If you describe the styles of these pieces, one after the other, you wonder: what do they have to do with each other? But when you listen to the album, I feel that there’s an arc, a throughline. I love that, because I think it demonstrates that the music that’s important to you doesn’t have to be the same as what’s important to everybody else, and it can still make sense. It can still have meaning. The main point is that it’s about connection and vulnerability.