APRIL 11, 2020 I’m a classically trained professional singer. The church where I work – as a choral section leader and soloist – has continued to pay me through the pandemic-related closures. For that I am so thankful: not every institution can afford to keep paying musicians in this time of such great need across the spectrum of our communities.
I have been putting recorded music online: old recordings, new ones of me singing unaccompanied, etc., and the church has used some of that in their virtual worship services. But of course I can’t be there in person. The part of my job as a section leader – leading my section as the professional singer among volunteer singers – is defunct because I don’t have a section to lead. I miss them.
I’m sure you’ve seen virtual choirs making the rounds, showing the resiliance of creative people and our need – as vital as the need for food or shelter – to create. For Holy Week and Easter, we section leaders were asked to record our parts separately at home for some unaccompanied Renaissance choral music. We each sang and recorded while watching a video of our leader conducting to a synthesized MIDI track, and he edited them together.
For me, making music in this way was demoralizing.
I had to record in a fairly dead room, not one with good acoustics, because too much live reverb won’t sound good when it’s all put together. I listened through headphones to make sure I’d stay on pitch and rhythm, and that meant I couldn’t hear myself except inside my head.
Classical singers’ voices are about 30% room. I mean the room we’re in is a big part of what our voice is, and we respond to the room. Microphone technique is a completely different skill, and what we’re used to is maximizing the efficiency of our voices so that they fill a room.
Even more important, hearing our fellow singers and responding in real time is essential to the way we do things. I’ve never read research on this, but I’m guessing that I make hundreds of conscious and unconscious decisions for every minute of singing.
Voices aren’t tuned like a piano, or like the MIDI track we used. Humans aren’t equal temperament instruments. What I mean is that we are always, always making micro adjustments in tuning based on where our note is in the chord, the vowel we’re singing, the range, etc. If I hear that my alto colleague is singing a brighter vowel, I will respond and do the same, because otherwise it won’t tune. If I find that I’m singing a secondary part, I back off so the main motive can be heard. And we can watch the conductor for final cut-offs until the cows come home, but when it comes down to it, we have to hear each other. We listen, we look, we think together. And we’re not made to sing in strict rhythm.
You may think that singing with a MIDI recording – everything perfectly tempered – might make us better. No. It makes us less human and more robotic, and it takes away the self that we put into it, the reason we all got into this in the first place. There is no room for changes in tempo or tuning or vowel. I can’t hear you and respond. It’s not art.
Make no mistake, this is not what we do. We’re just doing the best we can, temporarily.
Last year our four section leaders sang an easy piece together, something that had ten short verses of text to the same music. It was a last-minute substitution, and we didn’t get to practice. On the next to last verse, where the text is more gentle, we wordlessly reached a consensus to sing that verse softly and more slowly, before ramping it back up for the final verse. It was the kind of magic that a virtual choir can’t come anywhere near. That is what we do, week after week, every time we get together.
All that said, virtual choir is still better than not singing.
