Why Zoom will never replace the joy of actually singing together...

With their poignant video of We’ll Meet Again, the Chichester Singers brought the Virtual Festival of Chichester to a touching and appropriate conclusion earlier this summer.
Jonathan WillcocksJonathan Willcocks
Jonathan Willcocks

The words of the celebrated song looked forward to next year when we are all hoping that the Festival of Chichester will be back to normal.

But they also underlined the great spirit which has united the Chichester Singers throughout the crisis, under musical director Jonathan Willcocks – especially at a time when singing in public, certainly for amateurs, still seems a long way away.

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For Jonathan, it has been a question of keeping up the Chichester Singers’ spirits.

We’ll Meet Again – which managed to bring the Chichester Singers together in isolation – was their second video of the lockdown. The first was Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus. In both, the singers sang alone to a backing track, and the results were then sewn together by computer for the finished product.

“I was determined to keep as many of the choir singing and feeling involved as possible,” Jonathan said. “Some people didn’t feel in the circumstances they could manage the technology. You have to have one device which is able to access YouTube and another device which you are using to record you. For some people that was no problem. For others it was quite a technological challenge. But for We’ll Meet Again, we had more than 90 singers involved, which was excellent.

“And the two recordings have formed a really important part of keeping the life of the choir going. We don’t know what is going to happen in the next two to three months with the development of the virus and how social distancing will go and what our ability to meet in large spaces will be, but I am determined that the choir will start rehearsing again in September.

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“July and August we always take as our summer break.But in September we will find some way to start up again, and I am hoping that it will not be virtual. We may have to meet in smaller groups. We just don’t know, but we will find a way.”

Jonathan has concluded that the choir’s September and October concerts are simply not realistic. Actual performances might not be until Christmas or into 2021.

“But I am really pleased that our big concert that was supposed to be at the beginning of November will now be our big concert in March 2021 – Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius which was the first work I ever did with the Chichester Singers.

“I just think that singing is so important to people – quite apart from the fact that I would be bored stiff if I didn’t have it! Musicians just have to be creative and imaginative, and I think having the central focus of the two videos has done that. For me, the glass is always half full rather than half empty, and I think even in these circumstances you can still find positives. Nobody would have wanted lockdown for months and months, but there have been good things. You just have to find other ways to communicate.

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“I really don’t think things will ever be the same again. I don’t think we will all travel in quite the same way. I don’t think for meetings we will drive miles and miles and miles again in the way we used to. But nothing can really replace the camaraderie and the joint enterprise that choral singing involves, and the sooner we can get back to singing together again, the better.”

Rehearsal/performing via Zoom creates a boundary: “It is like washing your feet with your socks still on! But I very much hope that in the autumn we will be able to get back to doing what we love, actually together. Music has such an important role in keeping up everybody’s spirit and mental health, and with the breathing there are also physical benefits. I just think we have to view the difficulties we have had as an opportunity as well as a challenge.”

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