You may recall that when I retired from the organist position at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu that one of the things I would miss most was accompanying congregational singing. There’s something thrilling about pulling out all the stops and “letting it rip,” while supporting the exhilarating sound of people singing.

Oh, I’ve accompanied plenty of church services since then, but it hasn’t been the same … of course I was missing the Beckerath organ, the acoustics of a resonant building, and a bunch of Lutherans singing their hearts out. I’m afraid the other denominations don’t quite come up to the same level of enthusiasm in their hymn singing—and I don’t think I’m prejudiced!

With the COVID-19 outbreak, though, there’s no more congregational singing because in-person services have been replaced by livestreaming—people watch on their phones or tablets. There are no more choral in-person rehearsals; after all, who can forget the story of the Skagit Valley Chorale (“Choir practice turns fatal. Coronavirus is to blame“) this past spring in which people practiced social distancing, they didn’t share sheet music, and no one appeared sick? Yet two-thirds of the choristers contracted the coronavirus and two even died.

And concerts and music festivals have been cancelled left and right. I was supposed to go on a choir tour to Italy this summer and had tickets for the Passion Play in Oberammergau. The choir tour has now been postponed to 2021 and Oberammergau will not happen until 2022.

On Monday, May 5th, there was a webinar, “A Conversation: What Do Science and Data Say About the Near Term Future of Singing,” which was sponsored by The National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS), the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA), Chorus America, Barbershop Harmony Society, and the Performing Arts Medical Association (PAMA). Two medical professionals who also happened to be singers, offered scientific data to the discussion. They were:

Dr. Donald Milton, a leading researcher whose work focuses on the interrelated areas of infectious bioaerosols, exhaled breath analysis, and development and application of innovative methods for respiratory epidemiology. Dr. Milton is Professor of Environmental Health, University of Maryland School of Public Health, with a secondary appointment in the School of Medicine.

Otolaryngologist Dr. Lucinda Halstead, is founder and medical director of the Evelyn Trammell Institute for Voice and Swallowing at the Medical University of South Carolina. She is also President Elect of the Performing Arts Medicine Association (PAMA).

The topic was the future of singing as it happens in voice lessons, small and large choirs, congregational singing and concert situations. The webinar was over two hours long, and if you’d like to hear the full discussion, you can see the YouTube video here. (I’ve cued it up to where the webinar starts, at 6:12)

The webinar sent shockwaves through the singing community as summed up by “The Middle Class Artist” : there is no safe way for singers to rehearse together until there is a COVID-19 vaccine and a 95% effective treatment in place, … at least 18-24 months away.

More specifically:

1) There is no spacing solution for singing groups that would eliminate risk. … the virus… can infect people “at the micron level and can travel as far as 16 feet.” Physical distancing on a stage for a choir, according to Halstead, would not be possible: “You would need a football stadium to space apart the Westminster choir”.

2) Masks don’t provide safe methods of singing. On masks, Halstead states, “there are no barriers currently safe for singing.” An N95 mask may provide some measure of safety if fit-tested, but it would be “difficult to breathe,” “hot,” “decrease the levels of oxygen with rebreathing,” “cause headaches with an increase of CO2,” and “could injure people with significant health issues, like asthma.” Milton outlines a study of influenza patients who sat in masks for half an hour without coughing and “simply recited the alphabet three times.” Even speaking only a few sentences, participants with masks shed influenza virus from their breath in fine particles that escaped their masks.

3) Current standard testing still has 3-5% false negatives, and rapid tests are not sensitive enough for large group testing. There are rapid diagnostic tests in development “similar in ease to a home pregnancy test.” However, according to Halstead, current tests “are not as sensitive as the PCR test; you would need to be symptomatic, and it has a higher percentage of false negatives”. For these reasons, Halstead does not consider rapid testing safe for testing large groups such as choirs.

Apparently when people sing, it creates a kind of greenhouse effect, through their exhaling and inhaling, “tantamount to vigorously coughing (on each other and audiences) for extended periods of time” as my friend Dana Marsh wrote in a Facebook post.

The question is, will people wait 18-24 months to sing in a choir again? Will it be 18-24 months until we can sit in a concert hall again? Will it be 18-24 months before we can sing hymns together in church again? That remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I found these remarks on Facebook:

Stephen White: I am a singer and will continue singing, no matter what. I am a healthy person and the coronavirus poses very little harm to me, therefore I am not stopping singing in choirs. Ever. Period. I’m sick and tired of all of the Chicken Littles and their doom-and-gloom scenarios, and I refuse to give into the hysteria. I have no power over those who choose to stop organizing singing events but I will sing, no matter what.

Jane Dreier: To me, singing and worship are so bound together that I can hardly feel that I can be close to God without it. To abandon hope would be to abandon God and I will never do that. But this just breaks my heart. Thanks for your kind words.♥️

There has been a proliferation of “virtual choir” videos, with individuals recording their solo performances at home, and all combined through software to create a choral sound. In general, I scroll right past these, because it somehow feels inauthentic, and the choral sound seems artificial.

However, the video by the early music group, Stile Antico, stopped me in my tracks and is definitely a cut above. Even though there are only 12 singers in the group, they recorded the 40-voice motet, “Spem in alium” by Thomas Tallis, in a virtual tour de force!

Here’s what they wrote about their performance: To mark forty days of lockdown in the UK, Stile Antico has created this socially-distanced recording of Thomas Tallis’ legendary forty-part motet, Spem in alium, using smartphones and tablets. We hope its affirmative text and monumental musical confidence provide hope and strength in these troubled times.

I do hope you play the video … it’s definitely worth watching and hearing.