By Tom Huizenga: “Some people respond to suffering by turning it into art. That’s true even with the harrowing experience of a pandemic.

In the early 1400s, an Englishman named John Cooke composed Stella celi, a hymn to the Virgin Mary referencing the Black Plague which, according to some sources, wiped out half of Europe. Its text speaks of the “ulcers of a terrible death” but also the assurance that “the star of heaven … has rooted out the plague.”

Cooke’s hymn is unlikely the first direct musical response to a major pandemic, but it is one of the earliest. Many more composers, over the millennia, have been inspired to write music in times of crisis.”

Source: NPR Music