What a difference a year makes! It was over 14 months ago that the NBA and NHL teams stopped playing and the Bowen Island Community Choir held its last rehearsal. But like the professional sports teams and many other organizations, the Community Choir found a workaround, and we were able to sing together in spite of the pandemic. And no, we didn’t have to quarantine in special bubbles, rather we used technology to enable us to sing as a choir.
Zoom, Google Meet, FaceTime and other apps are great tools for communicating but they have a major drawback in that there is a lag time for sound. This is not important during conversations but it makes it impossible to make music together. The choir board with musical director Ellen MacIntosh looked at all sorts of options but nothing worked until late last fall when Cheryl Hutton heard of a technique using an FM transmitter, microphones and car stereos. We tried it and the Bowen Island Community Car Choir was born.
Sheilagh Sparks accompanies and Ellen MacIntosh conducts Bowen Island Community Car Choir May 8 in the Tir-na-nOg lot. Courtesy of Ellen MacIntosh
Since January, a group of 20 choir members have been enjoying singing together while safely distanced and following all of the B.C. health orders. It was not an easy process to get everything in place. Not only did we need to arrange for the equipment for our rehearsals and our concert, we needed to be prepared to re-schedule due to the vagaries of March weather. Electronics and rain do not work well together.
But we persevered. The choir held weekly Zoom practices with Ellen where we were all muted except Ellen, and then we had a couple of rehearsals in our cars. For the car rehearsals, we were accompanied by Sheilagh Sparks and for many of us, isolated in our cars having Sheilagh playing while Ellen directed was almost like being back in Cates Chapel.
All this work culminated in a “concert” on May 8 where a small invited audience tuned in to the FM channel on their car radios to hear the results of our work. What a joy it was to sing together! And for our finale, we were joined for two songs by Bowen’s own Maggie Davidson accompanied by Marc Gawthrop. It was truly a lot of fun.
As always after events, thanks need to be given. We would have been lost without Doug Fleetham who oversaw the sound board, mixing and ensuring that all our mics were live for all the rehearsals and concert. And we were fortunate to be able to use the Tir-na-nOg Theatre School parking lot.
A special thanks to Ellen who maintained her positive demeanour even during the Zoom rehearsals and to all the volunteers who made it happen. And finally thanks to the choir members who were willing to try out this new way of singing together. We truly did become, as Ellen said, “The little choir that could.”
Courtesy of Ellen MacIntosh
