17 minute read
CAR TUNES
How a family’s ingenuity made music during a pandemic
By Kathryn Denney
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Editor’s note: Kathryn Denney and I have been friends since the early 1990s, when she was a star soprano and I a nondescript alto in the Oberlin College Tappan Singers. After nearly thirty years of witnessing her talent and tenacity (and that of her husband and fellow “Obie,” Bryce), I wasn’t a bit surprised when the Denneys emerged as pioneers of one of the cleverest soutions to the problem of COVID-era choral singing—an endeavor that took them from their Massachusetts home all the way to the Today show. I asked Kathryn to tell the story of their “driveway choirs” for the members of CCDA, and I’m grateful to her for doing so. —ER
In a normal year, I direct musical theater: Gilbert and Sullivan, Broadway shows, children’s theater, public school productions, adult community groups, sometimes five shows at a time. On February 29, 2020, I finished a run of HMS Pinafore with the Sudbury Savoyards, while also in the polishing stage of a high school production of Beauty and the Beast, and just starting rehearsals for a multi-generational community production of James and the Giant Peach. I
sang in Labyrinth Choir, too, which planned to record an album and take a concert tour of Spain in July. On Thursday, March 12, I was directing a rehearsal of Beauty and the Beast with a wonderful group of high school students. They had just finished blocking the last remaining scene when, at 8:30, every phone in the auditorium rang at the same time as the administration told the whole community that there would be no school the following day. I looked around the room and did not see the elation that usually comes with news of a snow day or a water main break. We all knew, whether for certain or as a hunch, that we would not be coming back anytime soon. I crossed all the remaining Beauty and the Beast rehearsals and performances off my calendar. The next day I crossed off everything having Kathryn (front) and THE DENNEY FAMILY to do with James and the Giant Peach. The trip to Spain was canceled, then the March 28 band concert. My children, in 8th and 10th grades, had two weeks off from school; their extracurricular events were also canceled. A few weeks later, the governor of Massachusetts closed all schools through the end of the year. My children continued private music lessons over
Zoom, which worked pretty well for demonstrating and performing music, but, as we all discovered, could not accommodate real-time ensembles that needed to stay together. We began making more music together as a family, and, of course, we had plenty of practice time. On March 28 we gave an online recital that was so popular (because, let’s face it, did anyone have any events to attend?) that we decided to learn some more music and perform from our living room again in April, May, and June. On May’s program, we included some choral music, which provoked envy (“I miss singing in harmony sooo much!”) from more than a few friends who didn’t happen to have a built-in SATB chorus in their family or quarantine pod.
By this point, the concept of a virtual choir was ubiquitous. Nearly every singer can attest to having found a well-lit place in their home with a selfie video recording them singing their part while listening to a guide track, watching a video of a conductor, and reading music on a different device or taped to the wall. Everybody knows how to upload said video into a google drive, wait a month, and receive an awesome recording that is heavily mixed and edited. But the experience is nothing like creating harmony at the same moment as other singers, breathing together, locking a chord in tune, and feeling the collective pulse of an ensemble adjust to a common pace.
We started experimenting with the idea of bringing the gift of SATB music to people outside our family, even as the news from Skagit Valley the ACDA webinar in May made singing indoors with others feel too risky. My husband, Bryce, is an engineer with an insatiable curiosity for experimenting as well as a musician, and he was not going to stop thinking until he found a COVID-safe way to sing together in real time. We asked three of the other members of Labyrinth Choir if they were game to try singing at a distance. How about separate rooms in a building? How about one person on the porch and another inside the house? (A pane of glass should be enough of a barrier to keep aerosols apart!) We couldn’t invite friends to each other’s houses at that point, but what about our yard? Or....our driveway?
We bought inexpensive gaming headsets and cables and adapters, and we already had a small mixer. Thaddeus Bell, Lisa Bloom, and Daniel Rosensweig were our Beta testers, who drove into our driveway and sang from inside their cars. We started with music that we had recently sung in Labyrinth Choir. It sounded surprisingly good, and we were able to joke, banter back and forth, rehearse, build harmony, and enjoy each other’s company from a distance. Everything was great, except that there were a lot of wires. Our headsets had two cords each, one for the microphone and one to hear the mixed sound. We learned how to wrap the cords for minimal tangling, but we couldn’t imagine how tangled things would get with eight or ten singers instead of only four. As often happens when you learn something new, we posted a video of this new experiment on Facebook. Within five minutes, I received a comment that there was a musician in Virginia named David Newman who was conducting similar experiments in parking lots and publishing videos to demonstrate. He enabled far more than four people, he used wireless microphones so that there were no cords, and he allowed the singers to hear each other through their car radios using an FM transmitter. The following day, we Zoomed with David, who is an incredibly delightful person as well as a brilliant one, and we each had ideas that allowed the other’s systems to get better
and easier to use. We started a Facebook group called “Making Music Together during COVID” to share ideas and meet other interested people.
To accommodate more singers, Bryce ordered a bunch of equipment, including the exact wireless mics that David had suggested, and he wrote documents to help other groups build their own system. The director of Labyrinth Choir gave us an old 24-port Mackie mixer from 1996, which was in excellent condition (despite lacking a USB port because of its age). If we had capacity for 20 singers, we figured we’d see who else was interested in joining us!
On July 2, we had 18 singers come to our road and park within sight of our driveway. I stood in the center of the driveway where everyone could see me, and Bryce had the audio equipment and our electric piano at the bottom of the driveway. Cars lined both sides of the street and the base of our driveway. We sang “We Shall Not Give Up the Fight,” Cantique de Jean Racine, a couple of Gilbert and Sullivan favorites, and “Onward Christian Soldiers,” because the New England Gilbert and Sullivan Society was hosting an evening of Sullivan hymns and we said we would contribute something unique but familiar.
Word quickly got around, and other friends decided to come the following week. We hosted one event per week throughout the summer. Many of the people who attended were there to check out our methods because they intended to build a system for their own choruses. I would choose my favorite choral literature, and each time there were tears, goosebumps and sighs of relief. Some people didn’t find it satisfying to sing sitting down, or they were happy to help us learn what works but not independently excited about “driveway choir.” But many of our singers wanted more, returned week after week, and invited friends to join them.
One of our guests, Jay Lane, decided that he wanted to try this with his church choir, and wondered if we would be willing to put our considerable amount of equipment into a car to take it half an hour away. We could all see that our neighborhood did not have much capacity for further growth, so we would have graduated to a parking lot anyway, but the choir of St. Anne’s Church in Lincoln provided our motivation to buy bins, organize our equipment, and learn to program the wireless mics for other areas in Massachusetts. Visiting St. Anne’s was a turning point for me, because when their choir got together after months of singing on mute, there was palpable emotion and incredible gratitude. Their director chose the perfect music for that moment: “How Can I Keep from Singing?” and “With a voice of singing, declare ye this, and let it be heard.”
And that is exactly what we did, as we took video of the elation, the reunion, and the awe at how easy it is to rehearse and warm up and sing in harmony when you are together in person. We made a how-to video that described exactly what was needed to build this system, and every useful step of our learning process.
Two things happened around the same time at the end of August. First, at a “friends and family” event in our neighborhood, someone walked by and asked if she could write about us in a local newspaper. Would we be interested? Of course! Also, the leadership team of Somerset Hills Harmony in New Jersey
contacted us to say that when one of them came across one of our videos, they started furiously texting each other and within three days had purchased an FM transmitter and began doing car choirs of their own. They scaled up and did several rehearsals and an FM radio performance at a retirement home. They wanted to tell the rest of the Barbershop Harmony Society about this exciting way to continue singing together, and planned a series of five webinars to teach everyone how to run their own parking lot choir.
In the Denney home, our conversation was something like this:
“Yeah, they think it’s that important.”
“Sure, I’ll be one of six people in attendance.”
Little did we know: Christian Hunter and Charlie Ross had close to 100 people come to their first webinar, and they started a Facebook group, “Hot Rods & Harmony: Drive-In Rehearsals,” which grew to over 200 members. Through social media, we saw daily posts from all over the country, in which people would announce their first rehearsal with a system they had copied from David Newman/Bryce/Somerset Hills, including some groups in California that built driveway choir systems for choral rehearsals:
• Douglas Morrisson Theater Chorus, Castro
Valley and Hayward • First Congregational Church of San Jose • Gold Standard Chorus, Santa Cruz • AHH!cappella Chorus, Thousand Oaks • San Jose Pop Up Choir • Song of Sonoma Chorus, Santa Rosa
The calls and e-mails started coming to the Denneys several times a week. The calendar came back out, as every weekend in September and October filled with an off-site event for a community chorus, a church choir, a shape-note group, a gospel choir, or a theater company. Having outgrown our driveway, we started scouting out parking lots. It was clear that the world was not in need of better quality entertainment to consume online, but it was absolutely crying out for safe opportunities for singers to participate in musical activities together. This process became a gift we could give choruses.
In late September, we received an e-mail from a frustrated singer in the Barbershop Harmony Society who missed singing and happened to write for the New York Times. He wondered if we had any events coming up. Why....yes, a few, actually! Four in September and six in October. He joined us one night at First Parish Unitarian Church in Stow, Massachusetts. Music director Michael Pfitzer wanted to rehearse three pieces in detail and record them for a future church service. Bob Morris of the Times was one of the 27 singers who participated that evening. His article put into words something that I had been feeling: that creating harmony with a group of people is something that a human soul needs. It is the most natural thing in the world for a group to resolve a dominant seventh chord together. Watching
a conductor, breathing as a unit, and pronouncing vowels uniformly can be a visceral need.
A few weeks later, we received an e-mail from a producer at NBC’s Today show, saying they would like to do a spot on Sunday Today with Willie Geist. (Wow, people were really desperate for good news.) As we got good at the 20-person events, Bryce’s engineer mind was always another step ahead. Couldn’t we do a big piece from start to finish, just for fun? Our system could accommodate 32 microphones, but what if a group of 50 singers wanted to sing? My favorite large choral work is Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, which was sadly appropriate for late October. I didn’t know that piece well enough to conduct it without a rehearsal, so we asked Michael Pfitzer, who referred us to his friend Jamie Kirsch, whose Chorus Pro Musica was eager to use our 32 mics. His board quickly pulled together, searching for parking lots, making a parking plan, collecting participants, and making sure everyone had scores. (Yes, of course, let’s do it in German.)
I’ll be honest: We had plenty of new challenges related to putting on a Big Brahms Requiem Sing even before the Today Show asked us not to pack our car until they had arrived that morning to film us doing it. They insisted upon coming to “the driveway where it happened,” which meant I had to put in extra time to make my landscaping not embarrass me. And wow, my garage door could use another coat of paint! Our children wanted to come with us this time, which meant we needed two cars, and with so many cars, we needed to elevate the conductor. I found an old toy box for Jamie to stand on. Bryce drove to the parking lot first, shortly after the home crew left, while the kids and I packed the toy box and a large conductor’s music stand into the second car. As soon as I arrived, Harry Smith wanted to interview us, and I was behind. I hadn’t even laid out the microphones and prepared the assignment lists; the extra radios needed to be programmed to the unused station Bryce had found when he had arrived. During our interview, I could see the cars arriving in the parking lot, not paying any attention to the plan we had in our mind as to how they should be arranged. I needed to be helping them! My mind was on everything but what Harry was asking me, and the second he was done with our interview, I literally ran to the car to start doing all the pre-event set up jobs that I usually do.
I didn’t find out until later than Bryce had forgotten an essential cable, without which our system would not work. Luckily, one of the Today crew had a cable that fit. But that afternoon, as the righteous were in the hands of God, all I could think about was that my husband’s ingenuity and my persistence in gathering people together to make music had combined to create a magical experience for 50 singers paying tribute to the grief and loss that the world had endured during the past seven months. The producer of the show wanted everyone to take a selfie during “Wie lieblich sind Deine Wohnungen,” and several of the singers freely wept as they sang these glorious words in harmony with their friends, behind their steering wheels.
There was something addictive about bringing choral music to groups who wanted to sing together. We continued facilitating events multiple times a week all the way through November, thinking we would probably do a Messiah Sing sometime in December. But how would we adapt to New England snow and cold, when all of our events had to be outdoors?
Through our online community, we learned several helpful tricks. Christian suggested a propane space heater that reminds us of a horizontal gas grill. We put it inside a pop-up tent, which we had purchased in order to keep the sun off us in the summer, and to which we’d added sides to create a little cove that could be heated. This was helpful, but on really cold days (under 30 degrees) we would rent a U-haul and the space heater would keep the pianist toasty! The conductor typically generated enough heat through exercise that they didn’t need a heater. We added to our list of things singers should bring: • a sleeping bag • baked potatoes • extra blankets • warm boots • a hot beverage
We grew skilled at letting people know where to park for optimal view of the conductor, and at packing a lot of people into a small parking lot. We did have a Messiah Sing, conducted by Michael Pfitzer, with his wife and a group of her opera-singer friends performing the solos and duets as the 160 singers in attendance belted out the choruses. A local high school lent us a marching band podium; to our own list of equipment, we had occasion to add jumper cables, wind clips, hand and foot warmers, towels, and a sun hat.
By June, we had facilitated 62 events with about 50
• running through the entire show of The Pirates of Penzance, • piping the Mozart Requiem into a hospital for behavioral medicine from their parking lot; • hosting two consecutive church choirs the week before Easter on a Sunday in a torrential downpour with the only power source 400 feet from the parking lot, and calling my sister to see if she could pick up 400 feet of extension cord; • a children’s choir singing Christmas carols in cars with their parents and grandparents; • the first hot event after a winter and spring of chill, when we had to decide which window everyone could roll down and which would keep a pane of glass between each two voices; • the ensemble numbers of a virtual production of Frozen, performed by kids at our older daughter’s high school.
The salient feeling we have about this project surrounds the huge community that developed during a time when most of us experienced isolation. Problem-solvers shared ideas over the internet and challenged each other to go bigger, get smarter, work more quickly, expand our repertoire, and feel connected. On the www.drivewaychoir. org website, you can find articles and videos about choruses across the U.S. and Canada who learned how to sing from their cars during the pandemic. We are working on a documentary, which is in post production and will be released in Fall 2021.
We all look forward to being able to walk into a room, get out our music and start singing, without hooking up a single microphone, but we are so grateful to everyone who put their minds together to allow live, safe choral music to continue through a period when nobody expected it would be able to.
Be safe, be musical, be connected.
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