edschweppe | Driveway Choir! (Reply)

A thing my choir did the weekend before last: a Driveway Choir! Can't do regular choir in this time of COVID-19 (not without killing off half the congregation, at least), but we found a way, with the help of a couple from Marlborough.

And we even made the New York Times!
A Choir Finds a Way to Sing. Just Ignore the Steering Wheel.

I love singing four-part harmony. It isn’t just about the precision, the ringing sound when voices blend together. It’s also about community, listening to one another and breathing together, creating a mood-lifter and balm in a fraught world.

But like theater and hand shaking, choral singing has been canceled for now — and for good reason. Singing is the AK-47 of expression in the coronavirus era, shooting out so many aerosols that a church choir in Washington made the news in March when almost everyone present contracted the virus after a rehearsal; 53 singers became ill, and two died.

[ ... ]

It started with David Newman, a baritone on the voice faculty of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. In May, after a widely discussed web conference on the dangers of singing, Mr. Newman set up a sound system with four wireless microphones, an old-school analog mixer and an amplifier. Several singers gathered in their cars on his street, and he conducted them from his driveway.

It worked. Out of respect for the neighbors, Mr. Newman started using an FM transmitter, so the blended sound came through over car radios — as it does for drive-in movies — not over a loudspeaker. He found barely any audio delay. “The latency was near zero, which was really exciting,” he told the Chorus Connection, which creates resources for community choral organizations and estimates that 54 million Americans engage in group singing.

Word of Mr. Newman’s drive-in chorus gradually spread as he posted instructions to help other groups. Bryce and Kathryn Denney, in Marlborough, Mass., were inspired. Musicians who met at the Oberlin Conservatory, they and their musically inclined teenagers moved from singing in separate rooms of their house to cars parked in their driveway, and then to the street, to include others.

[ ... ]

On a recent Sunday, I was one of them. I felt nervous driving up the interstate while practicing with the bass tracks sent to me. The steeple of the First Parish Church of Stow and Acton, towered over the verdant town of Stow, Mass., west of Boston. On a lawn with equipment spread out around their hybrid SUV — complete with “Got Music?” decal — the Denneys prepared to give this Unitarian church’s choir the chance to sing together again, for the first time since March. And as always, anyone who wanted to sing — including me — was welcome, a kindness that has been chorus policy for decades.

“This is one concert that can’t be canceled,” Bryce, a soft-spoken electrical engineer and pianist, said as he untangled chords and patched them into the two amps in the back of the car.

[ ... ]

Cars began to arrive. A man holding some traffic cones directed me to park facing the church and the choir’s boyish conductor, Mike Pfitzer, who stood under a small tent. He looked down on the 30 cars parked below like a preacher delivering a sermon. Kathryn came up to each window and handed out sanitized microphones from a bin — like burgers and shakes at a drive-in.

I lodged mine into my steering wheel and turned the radio to 104.7. Bryce called the roll to check our reception. Mr. Pfitzer, also the director of choral studies at the State University of New York at Albany, started our warm-ups.

“I never would have imagined leading vocal exercises for singers in cars,” he said. “But here we are.”

He had us sing scales and arpeggios. Hearing others not just over my radio but also outside made my voice shaky with emotion, especially when we sang the chords I’d been missing for so long: sunny major ones, darker minor ones and a trickier major seventh, as well.

“And can you resolve that chord?” Mr. Pfitzer asked. More easily than almost anything else in my life, I thought, and we did.

[ ... ]

After we were done, choir members, many of whom had been singing together for decades, gathered with masks on outside their cars. They congratulated me for joining, agreeing that the experience was more rewarding than nerve-racking.

“It wasn’t just wonderful,” said Ruth Lull, a soprano. “It was like coming home.”