Everyone knows that this Christmas is going to be different — all because of the pandemic. For one thing, this will be the first time in eight years that I will not be leaving Hawaii at Christmas. Yes, it’s true, since 2012 I have spent all my Christmases in California (except for three years ago, when I joined my son and his in-laws in Querétaro, Mexico for La Navidad and El Año Nuevo.) But I still was away from Hawaii at Christmas.
I had even purchased a fantastic airfare of $400 for a round-trip from Honolulu to Los Angeles at Christmas time (unheard of!) but two weeks ago, made the hard decision to cancel because of the dangerously high number of COVID-19 cases in LA, which is in fact, THE Covid hotspot in the USA.
Besides, there is a two-week mandatory quarantine in Los Angeles, which would mean that even if I braved the five hour airplane ride, I would have no choice but to stay confined for two weeks in my sister’s house, where I normally stay.
Oh, I’ll still be cooking a Christmas dinner for a few friends, who will just pick up the food from me to take home and eat at their own apartments. And we’ll schedule a Zoom session just to see everyone and visit.
The good news is that I’ve already put ALL my Christmas music away for the season!
Why, you ask, when Christmas is next week? The truth is that as of last Saturday, December 12th, I had already prerecorded ALL the music for the 4th Sunday of Advent, Christmas Eve, and December 27th at Nuuanu Congregational Church, meaning that I was DONE playing Christmas music, a full 10 days before Christmas. Woo hoo!
But not to worry. I still managed to play a bunch of Christmas carols for congregational singing, and Russell Ishida played the descants on the trumpet that my husband Carl and I wrote in 1985. The congregation of Nuuanu Congregational Church will meet in the parking lot on Christmas Eve where a radio broadcast system has been procured. Everyone will be able to safely sit in their cars and sing to their hearts’ content, but will all tune in to a specified radio station where they’ll hear the service in real time.
You can read all about this phenomenon in the New York Times article titled “A Choir Finds a Way to Sing. Just Ignore the Steering Wheel,” a system which was devised by our friend, David Newman, who in fact came to Hawaii to sing a number of times with the Lutheran Church of Honolulu choir. (P.S. David is also a Westminster Choir College alum, as am I!)
It started with David Newman, a baritone on the voice faculty of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. In May, after a widely discussed web conference on the dangers of singing, Mr. Newman set up a sound system with four wireless microphones, an old-school analog mixer and an amplifier. Several singers gathered in their cars on his street, and he conducted them from his driveway.
It worked. Out of respect for the neighbors, Mr. Newman started using an FM transmitter, so the blended sound came through over car radios — as it does for drive-in movies — not over a loudspeaker. He found barely any audio delay. “The latency was near zero, which was really exciting,” he told the Chorus Connection, which creates resources for community choral organizations and estimates that 54 million Americans engage in group singing.
Word of Mr. Newman’s drive-in chorus gradually spread as he posted instructions to help other groups.
So bravo to the people of Nuuanu Congregational Church who will be singing the Crosiers’ Christmas arrangements — from their parking lot!
If you can believe this, I’m still getting royalties on these two GIA publications, even though they were published in the mid-1980s.
