How do you create music in a band, string ensemble, or choir during a pandemic? It is an exercise in overcoming obstacles and allowing your love of music to fuel your perseverance. That is just what Director of Bands and Choirs, Ms. Rosemary Kiertzner, and Director of the String Ensembles, Ms. Ann Mize, and all of their music students in kindergarten through eighth grade did this year. Allowing their love of music to guide them, the students and teachers in the music program at Clairbourn School put their heads together to come up with creative solutions to the question, “How do you continue and thrive with an art form that greatly depends on the active cooperation of all members of a musical ensemble while separated by COVID?”  

 

Why is music important to continue? The music educational concept is called, “Creating, Listening, Analyzing, and Making Adjustments IN ACTION.” It is one thing that sets the study of music apart from all other subjects in school. It is one reason why music is such an important part of education in schools. Music is unique. It is one of the only subjects that develops the whole brain, since it uses the physical or kinesthetic aspects of handling and manipulating a physical instrument, breathing, and movement, along with artistic expression and creation.

In medical studies, doctors and scientists who study the brain have found that musicians that have continued to play instrumental music year after year have more equally and fully developed brains. This is because music requires the musician to constantly use both the left and right sides of the brain.

 

 

Obstacle - I can’t hear you!  After meeting the challenges of learning many new computer programs, devices, and ways to connect, students and teachers met their first obstacle -- ”Oh, we cannot hear each other as we play music over Zoom!”  After the shock that such a fundamental need to hear each other while playing music was not possible, the teachers got busy trying to think outside the box to come up with ways to overcome this obstacle. This meant the teachers and students needed to use new and different ways of having one student or teacher be heard while the other musicians played along while muted. Definitely not perfect, but the best we could do on Zoom. That, in combination with Flipgrid videos, Google Classroom postings, and sharing one at a time in class over Zoom and we were on our way. 

 

Obstacle - Yay! I learned where the unmute button is!  With our elementary school students the challenge was heightened when our normal impulse to be heard while singing together caused students to continuously unmute themselves. Since only one sound can be processed at a time over Zoom, the student’s voice would replace the sing-along music, then another student would unmute and their voice would replace the last, and another, and another, until most students would unmute to say that they could not hear the music anymore. Teachers had to learn to restrict the student’s ability to unmute during a sing-along, make sing-along recordings and post them on Seesaw, make lyric sheets with pictographs in addition to the words, and learn to use more technology.

 

Obstacle -- How do we continue our school tradition of having winter and spring concerts?  The winter concert was the toughest because they had never done anything like this before. Once it was time to prepare for a virtual spring concert, the system was in place. For the holiday concert, students were required to go outside their comfort zone by completing videos of themselves playing their musical part. Then, Ms. Kiertzner and Ms. Mize had 399 videos and 42 videos, respectively, to maneuver into master audio tracks. With the spring concert, there were less individual videos since only the “Zoomies” submitted videos, but a whole new process was involved for the “Roomies”- recording all of the students 

on a total of 16 different musical selections. But, to enable the music teachers to assemble all of the recordings, 

they all had to be sung or played at the right tempo (the correct speed). This meant that both Ms. Mize and Ms. Kiertzner had to make play-along or sing-along “click tracks.” Using music composition computer software, in addition to them playing and/or singing parts, they created these play/sing-along recordings. That way, all of the students would be singing and playing at the same speed (tempo). However, it is extremely difficult for students to stay with the “click track.” Students have a natural tendency to speed-up when parts are easy or familiar and slow down when they get difficult. The teachers even found that some students, without daily in-person instruction, have a tendency to play on the front part of the beat, while others, though playing at the same tempo, are playing on the back side of the beat. That made it extremely difficult to line-up the recordings in the audio editing software!

Obstacle -- What are the COVID restrictions pertaining to making music in-person, and how do we have ensemble rehearsals in this hybrid learning environment? As information continued to develop and change, some Clairbourn music students found themselves singing and playing their instruments out among nature on the front lawn of the Manor House. And, they found that nature can be pretty noisy! Always ready with alternative lesson plans for rainy days or days that exceeded 90 degrees, teachers and student-musicians ventured out into before unused music-making environments. With a tape measure, masks, bell covers, microphone and loudspeaker, stacks of chairs, music stands, and plenty of industrial-strength disinfectant wipes in hand….oh, and a laptop to include “Zoomies,” they were on their way to practice music on the lawn of the Manor House.. With only a few months to prepare, and after one year of playing music at their homes instead of in an in-person ensemble, they quickly found that singing and playing in a group challenged them in ways different from what they had been doing all year. The students rose to the challenges and learned quickly, preparing their songs and recording them for the concert.

 

Obstacle -- Assembling the Virtual Spring Concert. Over weeks of recording sessions, more weeks of submitting, uploading, downloading, and cataloging recordings, it was time to assemble the audio from these videos in an audio editing program to create master audio files. Twelve songs and too many tracks to count later, the 12 audio files had been compiled, finely tuned and adjusted, and were ready to use. Next, was the job of reapplying the new master audio files to the videos and producing 12 separate performances. Once that was done, the actual concert video needed to be assembled. The audio, video, transitions, and titles were nudged into place.

This year, the students and teachers of Clairbourn School were challenged. They had obstacles to overcome, but through perseverance and determination, they succeeded. They learned many more things than they ever expected, simply out of necessity. Hopefully, through meeting these challenges and overcoming these obstacles, we have become better. Perhaps, we have come to appreciate many things we normally took for granted. Have a great summer and enjoy the Virtual Spring Concert 2021.