How do musicians performing together coordinate their actions to achieve a unified performance? We observed a singer (the first author) and pianist/conductor (the third author) as they prepared for two performances of Ricercar 1 from Stravinsky's Cantata, one for voice and piano and one for voice and ensemble. This article reports a content analysis of the musicians’ verbal commentaries made in two individual practice sessions and their discussions during two joint rehearsals at the beginning and end of the rehearsal period. In their individual sessions, the musicians began identifying features of the music to use as performance cues that would serve as landmarks to guide their performances. In their joint sessions, some of these features were turned into shared performance cues that could be used to coordinate their actions. The musicians’ comments show how they resolved differences in their conceptualizations of the compositional structure of the piece and how they coordinated their music-making through the use of shared performance cues.

The COVID-19 pandemic has hugely disrupted healthcare provision, including oncology services. To evaluate the effects of the pandemic on referral routes leading to diagnosis, treatments, and prognosis in patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, we performed a retrospective cohort study at a single tertiary centre in the UK. The patients were identified from the weekly hepatopancreatobiliary multidisciplinary team meetings between February 2018 and March 2021. The demographic, referral, and treatment data for each patient and date of death, where applicable, were extracted from the electronic patient record. The patients (n = 203) were divided into “pre-pandemic” and “pandemic” cohorts based on a referral date cut-off of 23rd March 2020. The median survival was 7.4 months [4.9–9.3] in the “pre-pandemic” cohort (n = 125), halving to 3.3 months [2.2–6.0], (p = 0.015) in the “pandemic” cohort (n = 78). There was no significant difference in patient characteristics between the two cohorts. There was a trend toward increased emergency presentations at diagnosis and reduced use of surgical resection in the “pandemic” cohort. This small-scale study suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic is associated with a halving of median survival in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. Urgent further studies are required to confirm these findings and examine corresponding effects in other cancer types.

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