Happy New Year!
The York Region Community Choir survived a year without a concert.
We had to cancel our Spring 2020 Concert, and there was no question of having a Winter 2020 Concert in the middle of a pandemic either. Although we stopped rehearsing in March 2020, we decided to restart in September. The plan had been to use masks and plastic face shields and to stand at a safe distance from one another, but even that plan went out the window. Zoom was the answer. We could not give up, would not give in to the loneliness of the pandemic.
I was not excited about the Zoom plan. The problems with unreliable wifi, "network latency" and everyone having different systems meant that we couldn't sing together without a horrible cacophony. We did try, and it's crazy, and we end up laughing, but it did feel good. We did it a couple times.
We're not professionals, so we don't have recording equipment and I didn't want us to create a recording. That's not what we do; we only perform live. We decided to have a season just for ourselves- A Season Just for Us. We decided that our meetings would not be rehearsals but an opportunity to see one another and to sing together as best we could. Turned out we could do okay! It's been fun! And, more importantly, we're reading music together, we're working on pieces in our repertoire that we want to sing again, and we're working as a team, having team fun and team jokes, and even team drinks!
So, I'm looking forward to our Zoom Choir in 2021!
We sing together, we do! It's not nearly the same as meeting in person, but it's so much better than not meeting at all! Please do try to join us this year. Maybe we'll be able to meet in person in the fall, and we won't be strangers to one another and we will have a good number of people who are ready to sing our songs.
Please go to the YRCC Google Calendar. There are links here on my blog and on the YRCC Website.
The Zoom link will be there every week, and there will be attachments (you might have to look for Attachments with an extra click or two). I attach PDF scans of our sheet music there. No need for a binder. Some people like to print out the music and put it in their own binder, but I like to have the sheet music on one device and the Zoom meeting on another, so I can see the choir and the music at the same time. We don't have a concert to rehearse for, so we can sing anything that we have a concert recording of. We sing with our best selves, our concert recordings.
You see, we do have recordings of ourselves, just for us. We can't share them for legal reasons, but we sure do use them for our own learning and enjoyment!
I hope and pray that we can meet in person later in 2021 and wish for a Winter 2021 Concert. We'll see. For now, we have another season Just For Us.
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