Singing During Covid: Part 2

(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.”