16/06/2020

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At the risk of stating the obvious, lockdown has not been overly positive for ‘the arts’. As an industry that works to find more direct ways of communication and stirring emotion, removing that most direct route of having your audience in the same room has been a colossal disadvantage. If that’s not bad enough, the world has looked to artists as if to say ‘go on then, we’re at home with time, entertain us’. The pressure some have felt to create is overwhelming.

 

Creativity, and originality, are fickle lovers. They are not taps. It is true that creativity often thrives under pressure, or perhaps oppression: how many of the great songs have been about freedom; or protest songs; or from hearts under pressure from grief, loss or love. But these examples are all protests against choices people have made or not made. Covid-19 has removed the power of choice from so many of us.

 

So we are left to persevere, to keep going, to try, to do anything but also something. And so Virtual Choirs, that oddly sterile gimmick that were once the flagships of modern composers desperate to be seen to be at the forefront of communication (and often totally missing the point in the process), have become mainstream. 

 

Virtual Choirs are made up of video and audio clips of singers independently recording themselves, which have been stuck together so they appear as one. To be part of a virtual choir you have to record yourself singing, ideally with video. You must do this whilst staying in time with a backing track - either with a series of clicks keeping the beat, or perhaps a video of a conductor beating out the pulse. This presents two very different problems. The first is one of confidence, the second is technical.

 

Confidence is like a flower. It takes a lot of hard work to make it grow, but it can be crushed  quickly by careless treading. A lot of the singers I work with in community choirs (a term I’m using for any unauditioned choir) have joined because they want to sing in a group: being a face amongst other faces, not being singled out, letting their voice be part of the vocal and instrumental accompaniment. They have perhaps joined hesitantly, some even are nervous before choir practice, but leave with that thrill that has made choirs so popular: a sense of achievement, of pride in what they have produced, that social buzz of seeing friends, the endorphins of having done some singing, and the adrenaline too. Talking to friends and colleagues there is also that wonderful escapism, leaving your life behind for an hour - one choir member even described it as like meditation.  Yet every week they might still feel that nervousness, particularly in small ensembles. What if Gary doesn’t turn up today and there are only 3 tenors? Will I stick out? Oh I haven’t practised that new piece, I hope the conductor doesn’t make our section sing that difficult bit by ourselves! As a conductor this is something one is mindful of, how to rehearse in a way that delivers progress but also still encourages. And here is the first problem of the Virtual Choir. To record yourself with audio you have to be confident in your voice. You have to be confident you will sing the right notes and be in tune. You have to be confident enough not to worry about the first two issues so that you can concentrate on singing in time. And, for video recording, you have to have a fair amount of vanity (I’m not suggesting this is a bad thing, I for one find myself staring far too much at my square on zoom calls rather than the person speaking).

 

This is a big demand on the singers in a lot of community choirs. Many have not really listened to their voices before, and recording themselves and listening back can be a frustrating experience. It may seem startlingly obvious to say it now, but choirs don’t generally listen to their own concerts. I would also guess that in many large choirs most of the singers will know which bits they can sing well and which bits they find hard, and on the day some will not sing all of the music, letting their neighbour do it - which is absolutely fine, it creates that fun, more relaxed atmosphere that makes the experience enjoyable. But when recording yourself at home, there is no option for that.  On top of that, when you feel self-conscious singing by yourself in a room, it is much harder to lose yourself in the music and make the emotive sound that you might with an audience, rather than the more cerebral, am-I-getting-the-notes-right noise that can be the product of over focus. This difficulty of ‘singing on the red light’ affects not just the amateur singer though, and I will discuss it further when we address the technical frustrations of Virtual Choir.

 

On the flip side, one of the benefits of lockdown is that older generations have been forced to more readily embrace technology. Not just the obvious cases of video calling, but all forms: I’ve had singers tell me that the bluetooth headphones, the christmas gift from a son or daughter that has been sitting in the drawer for two years because I-don’t-really-understand-them, are now gardening essentials. Have you heard of Alexa or Google Home? Aren’t they Good? So there is more willingness to contribute from some older singers. But just as there were technophiles before lockdown, there are still technophobes during lockdown.

 

So can a safe, encouraging, confidence building environment be created in building a Virtual Choir? 

 

Well, clearly they need to rehearse the material. But again this must happen in a way that does not feel too isolated, despite being exactly that. Many choirs have Zoom rehearsals, where the director mutes all participants and guides them through a piece. 

 

Is this helpful? If the singer can only hear the director and a piano, how do you create the idea of singing in a group?

 

A director could pre-record some professionals singing, but there are technical difficulties in then playing that ‘live’ whilst conducting. But a proactive director could find solutions.

 

Should a rehearsal be proactive or reactive?

 

A rehearsal should always be proactive in that a director will have identified weak areas, difficult corners, pieces that are not yet learned etc. 

 

But a rehearsal of course should be reactive as you learn voices, balance sound, and generally shape a piece. This is impossible through zoom or similar due to variable internet speeds. But many mistakes could be removed in production, and the choir balanced artificially then, if the director has adequate resources.

 

Is polishing a choir through production honest? Should the sound be honest?

This is a much harder question. Obviously any participant in a Virtual Choir wants to hear it back in the same way that one might look at a photo of oneself. After the work that goes in they deserve to be good. However with modern recordings we are used to a totally perfect sound - ultra polished, often with breaths removed and comprising sometimes of many takes. What we are endeavouring to create with Virtual Choirs is more of a ‘live’ recording, but I think as an audience we expect to hear a studio sounding recording (partly, perhaps, through conditioning). This also raises the question of whether we should include video at all.

 

Let us consider what an ‘honest’ production might be. Suppose we have asked a group of singers to record with a metronome or click track at the same pulse. They submit their recordings and we compile them in a sound editor, and line all the tracks up so they are in time and press play. We have not done any editing, so it’s very honest. However the singers have all used different microphones from different devices, in different rooms, and probably at differing distances. So we have compiled some really varied and sometimes opposing sound worlds, with non-uniform reverberations and at different balances - some singers will sound louder than others. It seems only fair after the work they’ve put in that we try to change the volumes of each track so they balance as a whole. Is this honest? Of course. But Barry’s dog sneezes half way through his recording, and Margot’s delivery of fish clearly arrived at 1:32 as her doorbell went off. Do we write to them and say I’m really sorry, you’re going to have to do that all again? We’d have no problem asking again in a rehearsal. But given the courage they’ve plucked up to send us a recording, is it really fair to ask them to do it again? We could just edit those bits out. After all, there are other singers on their parts. Equally, leave it in! We’ve had much worse in live concerts - from audience and choir alike! Isn’t that more honest? 

 

But it’s not like a concert, is it? Because we’ve made them sing along to a metronome. There’s no freedom or rubato in the beat, which can be limiting for expression. It can make it stifling, or robotic, and harder to communicate with an audience who we can’t even see. So if we’re going more for a ‘live’ feel, should we not replace the clicktrack with a video of a conductor? Isn’t that more human for the singers, won’t that make them more receptive? It possibly might encourage them more and help them ‘emote’.

 

A click-track with a count in is a very reliable way of establishing and continuing a pulse. It is obviously regular, and not open to interpretation: did you hear the click? That was where the beat was. But as mentioned it does not allow for any change in tempo. If the rate of click were to suddenly change there would be no preliminary indicator as to what it would change to (unless in the score a relationship is explicitly stated, eg crotchet=minim, which would double the speed). This is the argument against clicktracks: they are a reactive way of defining the beat. 

 

The advantage of a conductor is that it is proactive. As long as the conductor is sufficiently competent that the upbeat heralds the downbeat, the musician can see any change of tempo through that intent. There is also an argument that a conductor can encourage or specify the emotion of a piece through that intent, although this is obviously harder through video.

 

The cons are twofold. One, the position of the beat is less well defined, and could be open to interpretation if the conductor was suboptimal. Two, the ‘musician’ has to watch. For professional musicians this is not a problem, but picture the nervous amateur: they have set up their recording equipment, maybe they have already done a few takes and made a couple of mistakes, and they are gripping their score with renewed ferocity. Their attention is on the music and they are reluctant to drag their eyes away. The safety net of the click track is suddenly very appealing.

 

Talking of safety nets, what is the best thing for a singer to listen to when they are recording? What is the optimal singalong rehearsal file? There is that wonderful quote attributed to Mark Twain - “...sing like no one is listening…”. I think one of the joys of a large choir is that singers do feel lost amongst the voices, which allows them to let go of their inhibitions and sing with freedom. Can we try and replicate that in a singalong rehearsal track? Will it be like The King’s Speech? I haven’t done enough experimentation with this, but I have been testing out the differences between piano accompaniment, a synth band accompaniment, a quartet of voices, and double tracked voices (both with the relevant part brought to the fore) to see what response it engenders in the singers. The difficult thing is that it is not a response that you can guide, and losing oneself too much in the sound can be detrimental. When I participate in similar projects I use one headphone, much as most singers would in a studio recording, so that they can have some sense of their own output. As one excellent colleague of mine put it, “...there's got to be more sense of ownership from the singer to self evaluate... “. So we have to encourage the singer to lose themselves in the music, to not feel self conscious, but also be self aware and responsible. Already we seem caught in a paradox.

 

And so the final paradox: if you’re recording by yourself, then are you really in a choir? How can this really be making music together when we don’t hear each other sing? How is it a shared experience?

 

I think the answer is that we are sharing by going through a new experience with everyone else. Talking about it with each other, sharing what we found difficult and easy, what works and what doesn’t, is so important. As another colleague of mine said recently: It’s so much more than the music at this stage. As someone who has always tried to remind everyone that music must come first, I surprised myself by how quickly I agreed. It’s about keeping a routine. It’s interaction. It’s even about embracing technology.  There are limits, but we do our best and we’re learning all the time. 

 

W. Glendinning