You could consider 12:32pm Thursday as an official time of death for The Mothlight , an anchor of Asheville’s live music scene since it opened seven years ago. Within minutes of the announced closure on the club’s Facebook page , fans and musicians flooded owners Jon and Amanda Hency with notes of shock, grief and gratitude.

Musical artists looking for some magic catapult out of obscurity can hardly find a more alluring vehicle than NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest . Judges in 2018 spotlighted the Asheville band Natural Born Leaders , who found themselves with new listeners from around the world. Nearly 50 bands and solo artists from this region entered videos into the 2020 competition.

On Tuesday night, officers in full riot gear were video recorded destroying a makeshift medic station for protestors along Asheville’s Patton Avenue. About a hundred yards away, the following afternoon, Ian Wilkinson, an established muralist in Asheville, immortalized the scene on a boarded up storefront along Lexington Avenue. “This is our job,” Wilkinson said in between applying bursts of spray paint on a board beneath the awning of Asheville Hemp Farms. “We’re used to kinda creating this

Asheville Music Hall has seen four times the number of people turn out for its weekly virtual trivia nights than those who actually came to the club to play trivia before the pandemic. Still, it’s a thin silver lining. Matteo LaMuraglia, the club’s talent buyer, says Asheville Music Hall will go out of business within a year without the return of live, general admission concerts. “We’d be in danger with a year of no shows,” LaMuraglia said. “We can work around it for the time being, as seated

Malaprop’s Books reopened Tuesday under North Carolina’s social-distancing guidelines, but any enthusiasm to return to business life as normal was muted. Only two customers had registered in advance for reopening-day appointments to shop inside the downtown Asheville store. “There is naturally going to be an amount of nervousness because we haven’t done things like this before,” said Justin Souther, the manager at Malaprop’s.

Like every other gallery and arts center, Revolve in Asheville has been closed to the public throughout the quarantine. And like many artists in these times, Molly Sawyer has holed up in her River Arts District studio, thinking, creating, creating without thinking. A couple weeks ago, Sawyer asked Revolve director Colby Caldwell if she could use his space for a little while. “My studio is very small and dark and, really, I was just moving things in here to photograph and work things out and

NOTE: This is the second in our two-part look at the outlook of the Asheville Symphony Orchestra during and after the Coronavirus pandemic. Since the order to shelter in place, Darko Butorac has stayed at his Asheville home, trying to remain creative during the pandemic while pondering the future of classical music after it—not just for the Asheville Symphony but for large orchestras everywhere. “The experience will change. This is too big to simply ignore and say we’re going back to live

NOTE: This is the first in our two-part look at the outlook of the Asheville Symphony Orchestra during and after the Coronavirus pandemic. Darko Butorac is known as a musician and conductor. People didn’t know him as a poet or video editor until a few weeks ago, when he produced what the orchestra called a “Musical Love Letter to Asheville.” The video features a number of Asheville Symphony Orchestra musicians, from their separate homes, performing “Ashokan Farewell” by Jay Ungar. Board member

While the Coronavirus has infected every artist and arts organization, none appeared more potentially devastated—at least on the calendar—than the Brevard Music Center . Its entire existence is geared toward a summer concert season and a summer music camp considered the best of its kind in the southeast. The center had also planned to cut the ribbon on a new 400-seat, indoor performance space designed to house concerts year-round. But when the center's board unanimously voted to cancel all

The Asheville Symphony Orchestra is holding onto its executive director, after all. David Whitehill, who held his role with the orchestra since 2012, had announced in March that he would leave this summer for a similar position with the Louisiana Philharmonic in New Orleans. But on Tuesday, Whitehill said his sense of responsibility led him to remain in Asheville—with the blessing of the orchestra’s board—to see the orchestra through and beyond the Coronavirus pandemic.