Young trebles: The silence of a children’s choir in the time of Covid-19

Originally posted June 28, 2020. Converted August 4th, 2023.

The treble voices are clear, strong, and at times overwhelm the acoustics of Fellowship Hall at a Baptist church on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. It’s a large, live room.

“Are you heavy or light?” Fernando Malvar-Ruiz asks his Concert Choir. Malvar-Ruiz is “Mr. Fernando” to his singers, and artistic director of the esteemed Los Angeles Children’s Chorus.

“Heavy,” several choristers respond. “OK, what can you do to keep this from being heavy?” A few singers call out, “Support.” “That’s right. You need to support your breath,” he agrees. Then adds in his charming Spanish accent, “Let’s see if you can fix it,” he calls from the piano. They try again. “Better,” he says.

It’s a Tuesday night in late February and the Concert Choir of LACC is rehearsing for an upcoming gig. The Concert Choir is the organization’s professional treble choir that performs with LA Phil, LA Opera, and other A-list classical acts in town. The singers are mostly teenage girls, with a few boys in their soprano prime. Members audition every year to make sure they have a spot in the choir, or move up the ranks of the three apprentice choirs that develop these young musicians into proficient singers. It is not going too far to say LACC’s Concert Choir has one of the most beautiful ensemble sounds on the west coast.

Now he gives them a new vocal exercise on the vowels “see-ah” – ascending legato arpeggios on “see” followed by staccato arpeggios descending on “ah.”

“Nice!” He encourages his singers enthusiastically. “Very good! Can you do it again?”

Mr. Fernando’s language is respectful, his rhetoric positive. This is how he drives a roomful of middle schoolers and teenagers beyond their perceived limits. The scene unfolding before me is a best-case scenario of how the art of choral singing is passed down from one generation to another.

On March 4th, just over a week before Los Angeles began sheltering in place, LACC’s Concert Choir was at The Wallis in Beverly Hills, warming up to rehearse for an NPR live radio show, From the Top, co-hosted by Peter Dugan and violinist Vigay Gupta. I dropped my son off in the afternoon for a dress rehearsal, and returned that night for the performance with a last-minute ticket in the front row. I sat next to a CEO, who introduced himself. Inches apart in our theater seats, we opted to literally rub elbows instead of shaking hands, because, you know, Covid-19, we told each other.

The show was one classical music youth act after another. High school boys playing a saxophone quartet, middle schoolers playing Chopin on the piano, or Brahms on violin. One girl was a high school junior and a gorgeously refined cellist. Each act was interviewed by the duo, who asked them about their personal experiences of mastering an instrument. Artful music making was being embraced by a younger generation before our very ears and eyes. We were elated after the first act, only to be awed with each subsequent offering on the program.

LACC’s Concert Choir was last on the program. They sang two well-known pieces by J.S. Bach and Harold Arlen – composers who are important to Western music and are centuries apart, chronologically and stylistically. The ensemble of young voices brought new relevance to these old favorites – breathed fresh life into familiar tunes. The effect was infectious. The audience was on our feet cheering after the last chord dissipated. The CEO and I excitedly expressed our delight with the show to one another, rubbed elbows one last time before I searched backstage for my son to drive him home on a school night. At that moment I was a mom filled with gratitude that my teenager was a part of something so inspiring. As a musician, I was awed that he had opportunities to expand and be a part of an art form that is larger than the individual.

Little did anyone know that night that this was the choir’s final performance of 2020. When Los Angeles first settled in to shelter in place, we thought we would be down for a month, tops. But a month in, LA’s numbers were still rising. Within weeks, news broke of a choir in Washington state that spread the virus to 60% of its members in one rehearsal. A month after that an online conference of NATS and ACDA would conclude that choir singing was suspended for at least two years, or until singers could receive a vaccine. At about the same time, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom announced there would be no live performances until 2021, with no guarantees for the future.

Information was coming from all directions about how the act of singing was a “super spreader” event. Even small ensembles with one or two singers were cancelled. If you sang, you were out of work. In an age where social media amplifies our voices, singers were silenced.

By the end of May I watched as my network of singing colleagues grieved on social media about lost performances and opportunities to sing together. Not that anyone thought it was a good idea to keep working. The disease attacked the very thing singers rely on – our ability to control our breath. The irony that Covid-19 killed singing, the pandemic that attacked your lungs and left them with possible lifelong damage, was not lost on singers.

In rehearsal Mr. Fernando’s singers face each other for a sustained exercise on “ooo.” “Are you heavy or light?” he asks again. “Heavy,” comes from a few singers. “Let the sound pour outside you,” he tells them. What happens next takes my breath away. They produce a beautiful, homogenous sound, with gorgeous blend, and they keep the quality going to the bottom of the scale. For readers who are not singers, this is no easy feat.

“That was far better!”

This scene of positive rhetoric shaping young singers is gone now for many of those teenagers.

There are countless studies about how important music is to young, developing minds. Setting aside the years of practice it takes to master an instrument, music is a mental workout with just the melody, harmony and rhythm. It is in the camp of performing arts that requires you to work both on your own and in a group. You are responsible for your artistry, but you must rely on the artistry of your colleagues to put together an intricate piece of music that requires multiple musicians to perform. You are both alone and part of a whole all at once. I honestly cannot think of a better metaphor for life.

When the shutdown began, I was one of thousands of musicians and performing arts organization board members in California caught off guard. By April, we knew our gigs through June were cancelled. By May, all performances of 2020 were cancelled. I read my daily email with a sinking heart as the news came in. I watched from the sidelines as arts organizations mobilized to put together grants for musicians who they knew would fall through the cracks of federal relief funds. As a board member of an arts organization, I was grateful for something to do. We fundraised to ensure we could pay our musicians in full for cancelled concerts.

I cannot imagine being a talented teenager with a calendar of life-shaping opportunities unceremoniously cancelled. As adults, most of us can wait for a safe reopening. That’s not to say it’s not excruciating to watch gigs tick by unsung on your calendar. But, we are adults. We have already had the experiences that formed our dreams and desires. When I think of how brief a time you are a teenager, and how those years inform your being throughout your adulthood, I ache for the teenagers who are losing precious time to make music, theatre, dance, film, animation and more, together.

2020 was supposed to be a seminal year for LACC. In the full stride of his second year, (after following the beloved Anne Tomlinson who led the choir for 28 years), Mr. Fernando had made his mark as an exciting new director the choristers loved and respected. He was also the driver who expanded the organization to open one more high-level choir – an SATB ensemble. A first for the organization.

Furthermore, plans were in place to take the Concert Choir on tour in Spain for two weeks in June. Add the radio show, a full performance schedule that included their spring concert, and engagements at the Hollywood Bowl and Skirball Center, 2020 was a year filled with extraordinary artistic experiences for their choristers.

Teaching music is an oral tradition, embedded in one-on-one instruction and passed down this way from one generation to another. Music teachers meet in person to teach, listen critically to the sounds their students make, dole out wisdom, guide discipline, and introduce young musicians to composers they would not come across on Spotify. Some musicians can trace their teacher genealogy back several hundred years.

That is not to say you cannot have music lessons online. You certainly can, but you miss a lot in the transfer of information over the internet, such as the tone of the instrument in a live space. Teachers now are listening less, and watching more. They look for physical tension in their Zoom sessions, and trust that if they can teach an economy of movement, the right sound will follow.

Regardless of how many technically exciting virtual choirs you might find on YouTube, you cannot lead an authentic chorus online. As one colleague put it on her social media account, “I don’t want to sit in front of a microphone singing just my part, and then lip-synching it into a video camera with a smile on my face. THIS IS NOT SINGING.”

Chorus is community. It’s coming together to become something bigger than yourself. It’s acoustic. It’s blending with your neighbor. Leading your section. Watching your conductor, and being artistically flexible to do what s/he asks you to do. It is a contract that anywhere from four to eighty people make – that they will come together and sing something simply for the beauty of it.

“It takes intense focus to sing this well,” Mr. Fernando tells his singers in rehearsal in February. “It doesn’t mean it doesn’t have energy.” He’s letting them know he will not let them phone it in. To be in the choir takes more than a commitment to show up to rehearsal. They must engage while they are there. Without this dialogue, they would not be the phenomenal choir they are. Their sound would be more static, less alive. Their phrasing flat. Their pitch wobbly.

Sadly, there’s not a lot of engagement going on these days at LACC, which is to be expected. Choir has turned into an online musicianship course, with a weekly worksheet. There is no communing. No singing together. No blending. No counterpoint, or harmony. No being one with a large body that accomplishes great things.

Milestones are passing these kids by – graduations, proms, sweet 16 parties, driving school, and for some, an A-list summer of activities, such as a choir trip to Spain. These are the growth experiences that transcend school-learning for high school students. Clearly, Covid-19 is going to define this generation, but in what way? I watch as my teenager connects online – going inward at a time in his life when he needs to be guided outward. Opportunity to engage meaningfully is on hold indefinitely, which to teenagers who may be adults by the time the virus is no longer a threat, feels like an eternity.

“If you ask the finest singers about singing on the breath, they say it feels like the sound is outside you and you are doing nothing,” Mr. Fernando tells his singers. There’s a murmur in the room as Mr. Fernando pickups up his baton. Again, their attention focuses on him.

“Remember, on the breath.”

Response by Erin Maynes

Corey Carleton’s reflection on the last rehearsal (for the foreseeable future) of the Los Angeles Children’s Choir (LACC) was full of retrospective nostalgia for the large and small things we now realize our pre-COVID selves took for granted. Certainly, gathering together to enjoy anything communally has been called off, though we have developed small workarounds with the imperfect assistance of digital tools to imitate some of our lost rituals, such as Zoom cocktail hours with friends and colleagues, or movies watched simultaneously and shared over Slack. But choral singing, the activity that Corey’s piece commemorates so beautifully, resists these virtual approximations for several reasons. First, there is the impossibility of harmonizing, of melding one’s voice with the group, over video chat. There is also the grim fact that singing itself is an especially dangerous activity when what one is trying to avoid is a deadly respiratory illness. She cites the case of the Washington choir that continued with a planned rehearsal in spite of COVID shutdowns and suffered the consequences. These are sobering realities, but there is another factor that makes the LACC hiatus particularly painful for its members: LACC is a children’s choir, meaning any student’s participation in it year-to-year is a moment in time one will truly never get back. Students will age out, voices will change, lives will move forward. Instruction will not happen and opportunities will be lost. These things are fleeting, especially for the young people for whom the choir exists.

I am reminded of what the Germans call Sehnsucht, a longing for something you can’t quite put your finger on, a sense that you are missing or missing out on something essential. That is, we all know we are missing out on something precious, something important. There are the known and familiar things, but there are also the intangible experiences we don’t know we are missing, though we know we are missing something–the chance occurrences, opportunities, and encounters. I wonder how my only child, who started quarantine as a 7-year-old and has since become an 8-year-old, will remember this part of her life. This summer of no camps, no playgrounds, and no friends. There was the birthday party celebrated at home, the school days also spent here in front of the computer or buried in books and drawings when she would otherwise be out at the playground. She is learning about resilience and responsibility and reality, but she is also missing out on many somethings that I can only guess at.

But there are other somethings that this moment has put under a microscope, exposing the fragility of our entire social existence. The pandemic has laid bare the appalling insufficiency of our safety net programs just as it exacerbates preexisting economic, social, and racial inequality. The horribly botched institutional responses to this crisis have likewise forced us to reckon with how our lack of faith in what government can do has, over time, eroded what government will do. It has also sharpened my sense of my own culpability in the world-as-it-is, and my responsibility in making it better. This responsibility has taken on life-or-death seriousness, a responsibility that is literally visible on the streets, in the masks we (hopefully) wear to stem the spread of COVID to our neighbors, and in the extraordinary support for Black Lives Matter that has manifested in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. This moment has made visible to me the importance of community, and of our responsibility for and to community. And this is the something I hope my daughter remembers about this moment. There can be no going back to the pre-COVID status quo (I dearly hope, anyway). But what do I want back from that world? The things that are important, I think, are the things that promote community: the ones we live in, the ones we choose, and the ones that choose us. Community is something we’ve lost in quarantine, but we have also hopefully gained community too. That’s what I think about when I reflect on voices rising together in harmony at the LACC. And it is also what I think about when I consider this Decameronline writing group and the important social ritual it has become for me; an otherwise isolated activity during an otherwise isolating time. We greet one another, the timer is set, we wave goodbye, video is shut off, microphones are muted. Then we write, quietly, collectively, in concert for one hour. The buzzer goes off. And one-by-one we reappear in our spaces on the video grid, smiling together.