Continuing Despite Covid

Of course, every person and every institution on the planet has been impacted by the global pandemic in some way. For us, the real impact hit in March – we held an emergency committee meeting on 12th March in which we took the decision to cancel our concert scheduled just two weeks later on the 28th. At that meeting, we established our intention to hold our remaining two rehearsals, but agreed it was too dangerous to host a concert with audience coming from far and wide. We elected to postpone the concert, featuring Will Todd’s Mass in Blue and highlights from John Rutter’s Psalmfest, rescheduling for July and planning to re-polish the pieces that were almost ready throughout the coming months.  

As fate would have it, that was the last time we spoke in person. Our remaining two rehearsals did not go ahead after all, and the decision to cancel the concert with plenty of notice proved prudent, not least because a couple of our members did turn out to have been exposed to the virus. Official lockdown restrictions came into effect in the UK on 23rd March, just 5 days before the event was scheduled to take place.

While taking our regularly scheduled, if extended, Easter break we mulled over the best way to continue operating as a group while guidelines changed almost minute to minute. Obviously the arts sector as a whole suffered dramatically during this period, so in a lot of ways we have been more fortunate than many of our peers.

We decided to start up rehearsals via Zoom when the originally scheduled new term was set to start, and we found our footing week by week with the help of our Musical Director, Adam. Our sessions were shorter than our typical two-hour rehearsal, with a new-normal meeting following this basic schedule:

8.15pm – 8.30pm: Warm Up

8.30pm – 9.00pm: Repertoire

9.00pm – 9.10pm: Musicianship/Theory

9.10pm – 9.15pm: Notices

9.15pm: Finish/Social time

By this time, it was more or less clear that the March concert would not be able to take place as rescheduled in July, so we shelved that repertoire for the time being – we still hope to revisit and perform it someday. We started off by making our way through the Fauré Requiem, movement by movement. It’s a piece many of the choir are particularly familiar with which helped to mitigate the challenges of singing along by yourself in your sitting room, with your microphone muted, trying to keep up with the tempo no thanks to oft-glitching video and unreliable internet speed.  This makes it sound more cumbersome than it actually was – it was a very enjoyable experience being able to hear myself properly, and I love that piece of music so it was a treat to revisit it again so thoroughly. We hope to perform it one day too when we can come together again.

When we had made it through Fauré, we moved on to some familiar Bach and eventually Mendelssohn. As we progressed through the term, Adam also took us through short musicianship and theory lessons, on subjects such as:

• Score reading
• Revising between rehearsals
• Key signatures
• Rhythm
• Pitching intervals with SolFa

We devoted one rehearsal entirely to a workshop on SolFa and sightsinging by Cyrilla Rowsell – thanks to her for a memorable session, and we hope to learn more from her in future.

These sessions became a highlight of everyone’s week during those bleak, empty periods of lockdown in April and May. It was wonderful to be able to see everyone, if remotely, and continue that sense of community that is such a big part of our essence as a choir. We often lingered for another half-hour after the official rehearsal had concluded, chatting and hearing the answers to weekly quizzes which had been circulated (see an example of one of these here – we’ll link to the answers in our next post!).

While these sessions were of course no substitute for making music together in our usual way, or for raising a glass together after a sing well sung, it was a spot of light during a very dark time for many, and we are glad we found a way to keep our community coming together despite the circumstances.

We are still deciding what the future will look like, as things are still up in the air and changing all the time. But it’s a comfort to know we have the option of remote rehearsals as a backup, where we can still come together to sing and learn as a group. Many thanks to all our members for being so up for it!