Scheduling Solace
Erin Craig
Alto, Pro Coro Canada
I am the kind of person who, even in this digital age, uses a paper daytimer. I know there are many calendar apps that can add and repeat events automatically and remind you when and where you have to be, but when I used a digital calendar I always struggled to get the big picture of what my time looked like, and I missed things. My daytimer is filled with colour-coded blocks of time for all the different times and places I’m supposed to be. In the last three weeks, I’ve gone through and crossed out almost everything, and I’ve had nothing to add back in. It’s strange and surreal. I constantly feel like I’m missing things. But, I suppose we all are.
Last summer, when we received the dates for all the Pro Coro productions of this season, I coloured them all purple in my daytimer. As far as I know, the Good Friday performance is the only one that’s definitely cancelled. I don’t know what to think about the next production, so the purple time blocks past Good Friday are staying - for now. I’m not sure when I’m going to get the chance to sing in a group for an audience again. I think I speak for many Pro Coro singers when I say that it’s more than just another gig that’s lost with the cancellation of our upcoming production: it’s a family gathering, a community, a creative outlet, a higher artistic purpose, a reason to get out of bed. I’m spending lots of this isolation time allowing myself time to grieve the music that isn’t going to be made.
Yellow shows up in my daytimer on Monday and Wednesday afternoons. These are the times when I teach private piano and voice lessons, all of which have moved to online only. I’m pretty happy with my current online setup, though I’m sure I’ll continue to tweak it as the weeks go on.
Mentorship From A Distance
Honestly, there’s a lot about online music lessons that is simply delightful. I get to meet the siblings and pets of my students who I’ve heard so much about - sometimes the pets more than the siblings! Lots of them are excited to see my piano and where I make music in my home, and consider it lucky if my cat wanders into the frame as I’m teaching.
Musically speaking, I’m finding the online piano lessons to be wonderful! For once, my students and I each have our own piano - no more switching seats to demonstrate phrasing or fingering. I can move the webcam to perch above my hand when I want to show a student a specific fingering or hand position, and I can angle it on a gooseneck stand to show the entire keyboard. I can also see a student’s home piano setup - I often forget who is working with an acoustic piano and who has a keyboard - and can ask them to adjust the way they sit as they practice.
Voice lessons have been a bit more of a challenge. I tend to accompany my students frequently in their lessons, but the lag time in every video-conferencing app makes this impossible. There’s also the unspoken challenge of my students having to be entirely vulnerable as a singer in a place where it might not be comfortable for them - especially if they know a younger sibling might be able to hear them singing through their bedroom door, for example. I’ve started to try to focus on things like ear training, theory, and diction for many of my voice students. But for some, this will only hold their interest for so long, and honestly, I’m at a loss to figure out how to continue online with them.
Orange and blue also show up a lot in my daytimer; they are for the choirs I conduct. Orange shows up on Thursday nights, and is for the Accord Ensemble, which is an auditioned chamber choir for young adults. Blue shows up Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, and is for the choir of Robertson-Wesley United Church. The R-W choir sings at nearly every Sunday service, and is an ambitious, musically literate, truly inter-generational ensemble. Accord Ensemble is an ever-changing group of folks, as these days “young adult” often also means “moves around a lot”. Some members join us only for a semester, but for the most part, they are entirely committed for the entire time they’re part of the group. Most of our members have had recent experience in university choirs, and many of them are looking for a similar level of challenge in a non-university setting.
The members of both these ensembles all have their own reasons for coming to choir every week. I can’t begin to know what they all are, and so in my bid to be a good director, I try to do as much for them as I can: challenging yet achievable repertoire. A strong sense of community. High musical standards. Meaningful performances. I know how to guide a choir through a regular season. What I don’t know is how to guide them through an entirely unprecedented global crisis. They’re still looking to me for guidance, though, and it’s really hard to not feel like I’m constantly failing them - add this to the list of things I’m grieving.
The Church Goes Digital
At Robertson-Wesley, one of the things the staff have started doing is live-streaming worship experiences from our homes. My partner, who is also a member of the R-W choir, and I have started doing a weekly hymn-sing, and many choristers are tuning in to join us for that. As to whether they are singing along or just listening, I’ll never know! There are a few communications-technology-minded folks in Accord Ensemble, and those people have facilitated a “games night” over Discord, which we’ve done during our regular Thursday evening rehearsal time. These activities don’t replace the environment of choir rehearsal, and in some ways, it’s a really acute reminder of how stark the contrast is between being in choir and not being in choir. But it’s something, and it’s keeping us together as a community until we’re able to physically be in the same room again.
Last week, one of the pastors who works at Robertson-Wesley with me asked me what music I’m listening to to get me through my days in isolation. I thought about it for a minute, and answered that I wasn't listening to music, at least not in-depth. I also told the pastor that if I needed to break up the silence, I’d put on a podcast (“Harry Potter and the Sacred Text”, “Imagined Life”, and “Hot and Bothered” are some go-tos!). I’ve played so much music in my life, and have recorded as a side musician in a number of albums, both as a singer and a keyboardist. Whenever I truly focus on and tune into listening to music, part of that focus is often imagining how the ensemble might be set up in a concert hall or recording studio. And that vision serves to remind me of how impossible that kind of gathering is right now, and reminds me of all the music I’m not making. It’s painful rather than healing.
Finding Music in the Silence
I don’t think this feeling of pain while listening will last forever, though. A musician can’t stay away from music for long. I listen to the radio when I’m driving, if I have to drive somewhere, which isn’t often. My partner has been playing some of his favourite playlists on Spotify from the beginning of our isolation, and even then, I was grateful for the silence being broken in that way. In the last few days, I have started wanting to choose music to listen to at home again, which I’m choosing to see as a good sign. I’m leaning toward the comforting favourites from my past, as well as current artists that have the same vibe in my mind: Jayme Stone, The Amazing Devil, Martin Sexton, Joni Mitchell, JD Edwards, and the Bros. Landreth, among others.
I have depression, and I have lived with it for a number of years. I keep telling myself that I just need to get through a single day at a time. In order to do that, I’m finding that I need a lot of distraction and a lot of escapism. So, I’ve been doing a lot of video-chatting and phoning with friends and family members, more than I would if there were no global emergency. The other night, we had “virtual cocktail hour” with some friends that ended up turning into “virtual dinner and drinks” and lasted for several hours - I’m glad I had my laptop plugged in!
I have also been gaming a lot more. My partner and I just finished a run-through of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt together, and I’ve almost earned all the badges in Pokemon Red on a classic Gameboy Color - something I never managed to do, even as a kid! I’m also doing a lot more collaborative creative writing with internet friends as well. These are all hobbies I tend to put on the back burner in “regular” times. I’m grateful for the respite from bleak news and reality that these activities provide for me.
If you go on social media, you will inevitably find posts from artists saying they’re excited to create during “all this free time”. Admittedly, when we were first asked to isolate, I thought that might be the case for me, too. I had some pieces I wanted to compose and arrange, and thought this might be a good opportunity to do it. But as the time has gone on, it’s felt less and less like an opportunity, and more and more like a barrier. I was video-chatting with fellow Pro Coro alto Jane the other day, and we talked about how we are both finding it difficult to consider this time off as a gift. If we were able to plan for the time off, such as the residency that we participate in at the Banff Centre each February, it would feel different: in that scenario, all the things one has to give up to go to that residency are weighed and planned for. After that planning, it feels good to drop all one’s worries and just create. Here, there’s too much nonconsensual loss that had to take place in order to give us this time. Loss doesn’t make me feel creative. Loss makes me want to withdraw. I’m spending all of my energy trying not to withdraw entirely. I don’t have much energy left for creative pursuits.
I don’t know how to spin all of this into a net-positive, to be entirely honest. Except that, as I mentioned before, like I have done in the times I’ve been most depressed in my life, I am taking this situation one day, one hour, one minute at a time. And I know - I know! - that this is a temporary state, even if I don’t know how long it will last. One day soon, we’ll be able to make music together in the same room again. Looking forward to that day, whenever it comes, is the best I can do for myself right now.
