Singers from Our Festival Choir Participate in the Third Virtual Choir Video Project from the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians

 (A version of this article first appeared in The Messenger, the newsletter of St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jacksonville, Florida.)

Every facet of society experienced shock from the shutdown that began March 2020 as we faced a global pandemic. Church choirs also felt the impact, especially since a choir rehearsal in Washington State was labeled as the first superspreader event in the United States. Things we had never seen before happened quickly: the American Choral Directors Association hosted an expert-packed seminar that mostly advised its members to not hold rehearsals, masks specially designed for singers hit the market, church services instantly moved to on-line platforms, and “virtual choirs” became a thing.

Recordings and videos of choirs have been around for a long time - but singing in a pandemic required new techniques allowing musicians to sing and play together without actually BEING together.

The Association of Lutheran Musicians attracted a great deal of attention with its first virtual choir project – “O Day Full of Grace” – a hymn for Pentecost. The project, a new arrangement by David Cherwien, attracted more than 1,300 singers and instrumentalists.

This is how it worked.

We received very complete instructions including a recording of someone singing our part (soprano, alto, tenor, or bass) with a simple background accompaniment. Our first challenge was to take the musical score with this video and learn the music on our own. (This is very different from learning your part with the whole choir, including the singers in your own voice section.)

Eric O. prepares a video for a virtual choir

The second step required two electronic devices (in most cases a laptop computer and a cell phone) and a set of headphones or earbuds. While listening to the recording through earbuds, musicians used the second device to make a new recording (recording B) that had only their voice or instrument with no background sound from recording A.

The third step may have been the most challenging – uploading recording B so it could be added to the growing cache of videos for final processing.

The final product included not just sounds, but all the videos that were submitted. See it at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJETTBbnf6w If you watch carefully, you will see Bill Ahrens and myself floating with all the other singing heads.

At St. Mark’s we did our own virtual choir video for our prerecorded Advent Lessons and Carols service. You can still see this video on St. Mark’s YouTube channel at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCWpd1AClTA&t=718s. The virtual choir piece, Nancy M. Raabe’s setting of “Savior of the Nations, Come” begins at the 36:49 mark.

A screen shot from the Festival Choir's first virtual choir selection.
"Savior of the Nations, Come" setting by Nancy M. Raabe

The ALCM has created its third virtual choir video - an arrangement of the beloved Easter hymn “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today” by Kevin J. Hildebrand. This video has an added component with a customized third stanza that highlights the videos submitted by our own singers. (You still hear the full ensemble performing.) Thank you to Bill Ahrens, Ruth Voss, and Mark and Lynette Weber for submitting videos. Our St. Mark’s community enjoyed this video at the end of our prerecorded Easter Vigil service.

Videos from Festival Choir singers in "Jesus Christ Is Risen Today"

The finished product combined the efforts of 1, 784 instrumentalists and singers and was made possible by the generous financial support of Mark and Kathy Helge.

Here is the link. It includes the words so that you can join in the singing wherever you are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laZqLPmhNAc

Some of the 1,784 singers and isntrumentalists