Category: Music and Singing

Here are some songs of the season that I hope will bring you some joy. Bruce

This COVID lockdown has been difficult for many and tragic for others. Thanks to my privileged position in life, I have a number of tools in my COVID Coping Tool Kit.

I am retired and have a regular check sent to me each month without having to leave the house. I have hobbies like bicycle riding, walking, hiking and golf that I can still engage in because they are outdoors and have social distancing built into them. I have a computer and good internet access which means that I can write my opinions and send them out to friends, family and others which is something that I am coming to enjoy a great deal.

But, the tool in my COVID Kit that has had the largest impact on my ability to deal with the COVID lockdown is singing. But, I thought singing was shut down? Singing in person certainly has been shutdown along with live theater and all the live things that we know and love. But, along the way came virtual singing. Virtual singing has been a Godsend. I/we have learned more about virtual singing than we could ever have imagined or wished for at the start of 2020. Skills that will serve us well as we emerge from the lockdown. But, live concerts will be back. What will they look like?

What will singing in live concerts look like post COVID? I got a preview of what it might be when I saw The Aeolians from Oakwood University in Alabama singing as a part of “Live From London,” a concert series produced by Voces8. See the clip in the link below.

https://youtu.be/xD7QZgWlO9M?t=248

The singing was fantastic, but did you see what they were wearing? Yes, of course they were wearing masks, but did you notice the design of their masks? These weren’t your ordinary run-of-the-mill masks. These were different. I did a little internet research and found out more about these masks.

As we emerge from COVID and return back to the world of live performance, the first concerts could very well include masks like these for the singers. Concert attendance will be adapted to accommodate social distancing by allowing for multiple, smaller audience performances in the same venue. Tickets will be handled electronically for everyone. I can’t wait to find out what other methods will emerge from the creative minds of our arts communities that will make live concerts possible and accessible for all of us once again.

It is coming. We will be able to join each other and enjoy making and listening to live music once again soon. Hope springs eternal and we are getting ever closer to that reality. In the meantime, have a joyous holiday season. Make it the best ever and find peace in all that you do online or from a place of social distance.

(From my Daily Journal of December 7, 2020 with slight editing)

Virtual Choir recordings are a challenge. I hear some extraordinarily good ones that are well produced, well performed and that provide a pleasant listening experience. I have made a few recordings myself for my church choir at The First Unitarian Church of San Jose, CA, for my virtual choir at Mission College in Santa Clara, CA and with The Choral Project, a fine audition choir based in San Jose, CA. I have generally had pretty good success with them and have learned how to produce them with increasing levels of skill and confidence. So far, I’ve found that the audio recordings that I’ve done (which is most of the recording I’ve done) have been of better quality than the recordings that have combined audio and video.

To my choir directors and audio engineers, please don’t take this as a critique of your efforts to bring me and my fellow singers the best possible musical experiences during this COVID-19(20) Shelter-in-Place period. Your efforts have been exceptional. But, I find that there is an inherent weakness in the Virtual Choir setting. I am isolated from my vocal companions and my voice is the only one that I hear in the production of a piece until all of the individual vocal and instrumental tracks are engineered together using the mind expanding tools of computer technology, the hardware and the software that allow us to continue making music when in earlier times, this would not have been possible.

There is a lot of energy that each performer puts in while trying to create a state of mind in which you can mentally put your colleagues around you in your rehearsal and performance spaces. This requires a considerable amount of conscious mental energy. This use of energy to create the choral setting in my mind draws energy that would otherwise be spent on vocal production. I am speaking for myself, but I find the virtual medium to be a challenging place to produce the vocal product that I know I am capable of producing. What comes out on the recording of myself is much different than the product produced when singing together with my mates.

The virtual singing environment seems to work better for individuals and small groups using high quality production equipment. Many of the most beautiful and spiritually uplifting pieces that I’ve heard online would rival the live performance of the same concert. The best of these works have been those where the choral ensembles practicing strict COVID precautions have gathered together to sing, video taped the performance and then shared it on the computer screen

Examples of this are “Live From London” and “Live From London Christmas.” These concerts were produced by Voces 8. They are professionals that sing for a living.

Again , with all due deference to the hard working choral directors and engineers trying to make the best of making music while in isolation, the choral experience is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to duplicated online. We can begin to see glimpses of it online, but the synergy, the eye contact, the socialization, the body language, the blending of sounds, even making mistakes together are all part of the experience of making music together. Music, as we are all too painfully experiencing during COVID is a personal/collective experience meant to be done together.

An episode in the third season of the Netflix series “The Crown” provides a strong illustration of my point. In 1966 there was a tragic accident in the small coal mining town of Aberfan, Wales that resulted in the deaths of 144 people (28 Adults and 116 Children). A mountainside of coal waste slid down and destroyed the local school. As you can imagine, the town’s grief was unimaginable in it’s scale.

At the memorial service following the disaster, the grieving townspeople still deeply in shock over the losses of friends and family began singing. The Welch people have a long tradition of being a people that sing. They coped with their unspeakable grief by doing what gave their souls and the souls of their departed loved ones the peace that they needed in the best way that they could. By channeling their personal and collective emotions through song, they were able to make it through that day and begin the healing process.

You simply must be together for some things.

So, as a singer, I must accept this virtual reality for a while longer and make the best of it. With the help of my fellow singers, our marvelous directors and the technological gurus that make it happen, virtual singing will bring joy into the homes and hearts of we the performers and our audiences around the world until we can once again do what we all long to do.

Seeing my friends and colleagues online is a step in the right direction and helps renew the contacts by seeing faces and hearing the voices of the people that we have not been able to see in person for going on nine months now. For this I am eternally thankful to those that have made singing possible during the pandemic.

Bless you, bless my fellow singers and bless all of us that benefit from vocal music. Have the best holiday season ever. Join Jimmy Kimmel and Andrew Rannels for “2020: The Musical.”

Here are two calming choral works by composer Bill Douglas .

I am a singer. Singing is a very important part of my mental well-being and provides a connection and an outlet for my musical talent and social community. Singing side-by-side with my friends and colleagues is what keeps me going during the hustle and bustle of normal 21st Century life.

It is important during normal times. It is more important during COVID times. But, singing in a chorus involves sitting in close proximity to your mates and moving large amounts of air and the contents of that air into the shared air space of a choral rehearsal or performance space.

This air is a very effective medium for the spread of potentially virus carrying aerosols to your fellow singers and to you. For that reason, singing in-person was quickly identified as a sure fire way to spread virus containing aerosols rapidly and effectively.

Back in mid-March when California shut down in response to the novel Coronavirus, both my church choir and my audition choir very quickly realized the risk of viral spread among choristers and halted live rehearsals.

It’s hard enough to be socially isolating, but it goes to another level of impact when that isolation takes away an avocation that is central to your health and happiness. A previous post on this site goes into some detail about the benefits of singing in a group.

In the early days of the pandemic, the double whammy of social isolation and choral isolation began to take hold. Soon, individual performers, usually professionals, began finding ways to perform online.

These performances were very pleasing to hear. But for me, they were further reminders of the fact that we were unable to sing together at our normal Monday and Wednesday rehearsals for my two respective choirs.

So, what about choirs? Digital platforms were not set up to work with performers performing together in real time. There was the issue of how to sing together in real time. Performances can be recorded and mixed together in an asynchronous way, but rehearsals need to be done in real time.

Our now familiar virtual meeting platforms are not yet capable of allowing choral groups to rehearse together in real time. But, that has begun to change as the months go by. Techniques to utilize the online video meeting platform for choir rehearsals and performance began to evolve.

These techniques have eased the pain of not being together to sing, but they haven’t yet been able to duplicate the singing experience online. This is of considerable significance to me as a singer, especially since the Unitarian Universalist Association, the guiding body of our church community, announced that it was strongly advising that congregations not meet together until the Summer of 2021 at the earliest.

What were singers to do in response to not being able to sing together?

Well, we all are now familiar with digital meeting platforms like Zoom, Google Meets etc. We are spending many hours on them for work, so the time that we spend online for our hobbies and enjoyment are under pressure to happen in a more concentrated and efficient way. No more two and three hour rehearsals. Some groups are trying to solve the technical problems of rehearsing online by meeting in expansive outdoor settings like in parking garages or parks, but many people are uncomfortable with this solution.

As we learn how to practice our craft in the socially distanced reality of COVID, we are learning to record ourselves in isolation from our peers and waiting for our choir directors and sound engineers to gather those individual recordings and compile them into a choral sound. This can be done. I have experienced the joy of harmonizing with my fellow choristers. It brings tears of joy to my eyes just writing about it.

Virtual singing is a temporary solution to singing remotely. It isn’t perfect, but it will serve to hold our choral communities and audiences together until we once again can make music together. Here’s a personal testimonial on the power of singing together even in the virtual world.