Excerpts from my musical life

On Again-Off Again

April 17, 2022, Easter Day

Two years ago, on March 13, 2020, our choir season ended, a month before Easter. Before then I could depend on beginning my singing year the week after Labor Day and ending it in early June. But since then, I’ve suffered a patchwork of halted seasons and celebrated salvaging parts of the, depending on the wax and wane of one Covid strain after another.

To try and overcome our separation, we became a virtual choir, which meant we each recorded a video of ourselves singing an anthem alone at home to a click track. When we submitted our videos, they were edited into a choir “performance.” It was so sterile that I can hardly count it as music. I’m in the choir because I enjoy singing with my friends, hearing my voice as part of them, being in the energy we all create.

A year ago we emerged from lockdown, vaccinated and sure Covid was on the wane for good. Reuniting for choral evensongs in April and May felt like magic, even though we sang masked and had to stand at least six feet from each other. Because that took up the whole sanctuary, we recorded the services rather than sing to an in-person congregation. But we were together and we filled the church building with live music.

Come September things looked up even more. We began a new season, confident we could sing through it without interruption. The church opened to the congregation.

From behind our masks we delivered a full and rewarding fall season — Sunday services, three choral evensong services, Faure’s Requiem for All Saints’ Day, Advent Lessons and Carols, and Christmas Eve Carols and the midnight service.

Then, on our week off after the holiday, the Omega variant sent us into another hiatus, this one a month long. By now I was used to the on again-off again routine.

Fortunately, we gathered again in February. In March, feeling confident once again that Covid was no longer a threat, my fellow singers decided they’d had enough of singing masked. So now they’re singing unprotected. I, however, am not. I have stayed blessedly healthy for two years and I don’t want to chance getting sick. Covid is on the rise here, again.

I couldn’t have imagined that I would sit out Holy Week and Easter Sunday voluntarily, but here I am.