Some kind of order is beginning to emerge out of the chaos. Bristol Choral Society has started having online rehearsals. Messages about ‘virtual choir pubs’ and ‘virtual pub choirs’ are dropping into my inbox, and social media is full of people posting recordings of themselves or others playing favourite pieces. On Twitter, I’m following the ‘World Cup of Evensong Canticles’, where canticles settings are pitted against one another for us to vote on. I’ve even dared to sign up to sing in a concert in the Cheltenham Festival in July. [which was cancelled the day after I wrote this]
The online rehearsal works by muting us all on Zoom, so we can see and hear our conductor but hear only ourselves. We do get some feedback from her because she can comment (for example) on posture and mouth shape in our warm ups. Just for fun we are sometimes unmuted in the final few bars of a piece so we can enjoy the variety of time lags. There are entire virtual choirs springing up but I’m content to keep on with my solo practice otherwise.
I wish I’d started following the World Cup for canticles earlier, because I’ve enjoyed weighing up the merits of one setting against another. Mostly I come to a decided preference quite easily, unless there’s been a setting completely unknown to me (and I only want to vote when I’ve sung both canticle settings – just listening to them isn’t enough). A few have been genuinely hard to decide. Surely Byrd ‘Great’ vs Howell’s St. Paul’s would go to penalties? As for Sumsion in G and Darke in F, that has what a local freesheet once described as ‘no-goal thriller’ written all over it.
Beyond this is the uncertainty of what happens when choirs restart. Any kind of hiatus in the usual pattern of concerts can be risky. People will be out of practice at singing with one another and possibly with singing generally (though the virtual choirs are trying to ensure that doesn’t happen). And there is the risk of what happened when the Brandon Hill Singers changed conductor; a loss of singers to other choirs.