The sky today is a crisp, bright blue. Fresh snow covers the ground, but it melts rapidly in the strengthening sun. A day to look hopefully, energetically toward the future. The city’s major museums have announced that they will begin opening to the public, on a limited basis. The pandemic continues to rage, but the air carries the promise that it will, in time, burn out and we will be able to rebuild our lives and careers.
Canada geese, together against the cold.
Chorale members zoomed in for our weekly meeting last night. We greet one another, talk about events and concerns, sing (muted, each member acoustically isolated from the rest of the group), discuss issues raised by our current project. We are preparing a video performance of a Kyrie eleison, adapted from music composed by Edvard Grieg for Ibsen’s play, Per Gynt. Each singer prepares the music on their own, then sings along with a piano version recorded by our accompanist, Kit Bridges, along with a video of me, conducting it. Audio and video versions from each singer are then mixed by our engineer, Alex Luke, culminating in the Hollywood Squares-type presentation you see on Youtube. Sound complicated?
This is how choir is done, nowadays. In the late summer and fall, when school and university ensembles were reconvening, choirs were able to rehearse outdoors, socially distanced, in drained swimming pools, parking ramps, athletic fields, even on Chicago’s Midway. Once cold weather settled in, however, these options were no longer available to choral groups. Some ensembles gathered indoors, wearing special “singer masks,” limiting their numbers and their time together, carefully cleaning and ventilating their rehearsal spaces. But the surge in covid cases as winter closed in discouraged most groups, and Zoom rehearsals and performances once again became the norm.
Chorale has completed six virtual projects and posted them on our Youtube channel, with a seventh currently in production. Even our upcoming gala, on March 24, will take place on Zoom. For the foreseeable future, until vaccination really takes hold and breaks the back of this plague, this is what we, and our fellow choristers and choral ensembles around the world, have.
We call ourselves an ensemble for good reason. The word means “together” in French, which meaningfully describes what a choir is, and does: we are together. We sing, and make music, together. The name of the popular American ensemble, Conspirare, says it all: we breathe together. And the toughest thing for us, these days, is to be and breathe together. Ensembles are not static entities— if they are not together, they tend to fall apart. With your help and support, along with the courage and discipline of our membership, we hang in there. We all look forward to better times ahead— but for now, we are learning, on the most basic level, the meaning and value of what we do.
Chorale and Kit Bridges, rehearsing together during pre-Covid times.