Cellist and composer Joshua Roman to tell his long COVID story on music tour | News, Sports, Jobs

photo by: Jasmina Tomic/TED

Joshua Roman performs at the second dress rehearsal of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant, Monday, April 15, 2024.

That all changed Friday evening, after cellist and composer Joshua Roman performed Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto — a piece he had been eagerly awaiting to perform the following day.

He tested positive for COVID-19, and while he expected the illness to last only a week, he quickly realized his symptoms would not subside.

“I had trouble talking, thinking, standing and walking,” Roman said. “I couldn’t feel or smell anything. It really threw me off balance.”

He was eventually diagnosed with long-term COVID, and there were no easy treatments for the lingering symptoms—brain fog, fatigue, and moments when he would “fall asleep” after playing just two minutes of cello.

“And that was my first real insight into the energy needed to perform cognitive tasks, because all it took was 20 minutes of gaming or less than two minutes of exercise, and the effect was the same.”

In the summer of 2023, more than two years after he first fell ill with long COVID, he began to pursue a new musical path. He decided to record an album, “Immunity,” that reflected his experience with COVID and his path to healing. This fall, Roman will tour across the country to promote his album, and will perform at various COVID clinics, including one at the University of Kansas on October 3rd.

He describes the project as an opportunity to be vulnerable in a way he hadn’t experienced before. Roman’s album came out as a way to connect with people on a deeper level.

The song on his album, also titled Immunity, was a song expressing all the lessons he learned from long COVID. But it wasn’t easy for him to do it well.

“I thought it was important to start with a disaster and then have the struggles and the lessons and the ups and downs and everything else,” Roman said. “I just couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t find it. I was very frustrated because everything I was writing at the time sounded too groovy or too happy to me.”

When his recording session came around, the piece was left unfinished. He decided to embrace the process, allowing himself to compose whatever emerged in the moment.

“I was so disappointed that it wasn’t a serious, epic song, but it ended up being one of my favorite, most joyful songs to play,” Roman said. “I realized I couldn’t bring myself to write the song I wanted, but when I let go and just played, I came out with the song I needed.”

During the presentation of the “Immunity” program, he hopes the public will have a better understanding of the space of long COVID and other diseases that can sometimes be difficult to spot.

“I think if we take care of those most affected by disability, vulnerability or whatever, we’re really doing something good for all of us,” Roman said.

“This is something that starts with long COVID, and then there’s the other side of the coin,” he said. “I think we all need to accept our vulnerability as a strength, rather than trying to hide it, because why else are we here, to connect with people and experience life together.”

Roman has been playing the cello since he was three years old and knew from that moment on that he wanted to do it forever. At just 22, he was the youngest principal cellist in the Seattle Symphony and has since performed as a soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and many other orchestras.

“I remember feeling very strongly that the cello was kind of the whole thing for me,” Roman said. “Whatever other ambitions I had in life were meant to be channeled through music and through the cello.”

Roman’s debut solo album, Immunity, will be released on October 4th. The twelve-track album will feature compositions by JS Bach, Allison Loggins-Hull, George Crumb, Caroline Shaw, Leonard Cohen, and two of Roman’s own compositions. In the fall of 2024, Roman will embark on an Immunity tour to Long COVID clinics across the United States, with the first stop being in Fruita, Colorado on September 10th.