This past weekend I had had the pleasure of singing "happy birthday" to our one-year-old granddaughter in California along with her other grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins elsewhere in Illinois as well as in Boston. I believe there were two choruses. Michael and I followed someone somewhere, and eventually each chorus came to an end.
It was a glorious birthday party!
We also had Friday night and Saturday morning services for the High Holy Days via Zoom, where Michael and I, being the instrumentalists, are the ones responsible for leading the congregational singing. When doing this we have to be careful NOT to follow anyone who is singing, even if they seem to be ahead of us (yes, there are people who sing ahead even under non-Zoom circumstances).
I came to the realization that if we, as the instrumentalists, pause at the end of every phrase in order to let all the phrases of all the congregants finish (thus ending phrases at the same time), we can all begin the next phrase with a feeling of togetherness. During the pauses between phrases, I started imagining the great cathedrals of Europe, with their vaulted ceilings and thunderous echoes. The musicians who worked in those vaunted establishments during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance also needed to manage physical time lags.
The antiphonal part of the Rosh Hashanah morning service is the Shofar service. Hearing the "Takia" caller and the resulting Shofar blasts was a remarkable experience through Zoom. That such an ancient exchange could be accomplished across several states and time zones boggles the mind.
I wonder if it might be possible to write a piece of antiphonal music that could intentionally be played together over Zoom. Allowances would need to be made for a wide variety of time lags, and there would have to be a way to set each microphone to allow for different dynamics. A great amount of indeterminacy would have to be written into the piece.
I don't know if it is something I could do, but I would certainly be interested to see what kinds of new chamber music emerge from this time of social distancing.
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Fascinating comparison between medieval European cathedrals and Zoom. This also makes me think of "lining out" of hymns as it was done in most 17th C. N. American churches, and as it's still done today by the Old Regular Baptists. And the call-and-response of Black spirituals. And I like the idea of a Zoom-specific antiphonal composition -- and based on your description of playing for services, I'd love to see this done fo amateur musicians, like a congregational choir.
There is at least one additional aspect of Zoom's technology that would have to be taken into account: Zoom gives preference to the loudest audio stream, and one person talking really loudly can deliberately drown out other speakers (I've been in Zoom meetings where this happened; heck, I used this technique myself to drown out someone disrupting a Zoom meeting). By default, Zoom also uses automatic gain control, but you can turn this off. So another way a Zoomcentric composition could get interesting is writing in dynamics, where performers would fade in and out but Zoom would suddenly (and somewhat randomly) cut one off and bring another one in.
Another interesting possibility is that you can share an audio track on Zoom, so you could have pre-recorded sounds or loops that the performers interact with (again with the possiblity of rising and falling dynamics).
I have pretty much completed a two-voice piece suitable for amateur musicians, and I'm making versions of it for various combinations of woodwind and stringed instruments. I'll be doing two test runs of it (with different instruments and on different platforms) this weekend, and if all goes well I will be able to share the music.
I love your new composition. Now all the singers out here wonder, will she write something for two voices?...
I have a text. It was part of Yom Kippur services this
Morning. (It will be in English.)
I abandoned the Yom Kippur text in favor of some poems by Christopher Smart. You can find the link here, Dan!
https://thematiccatalog.blogspot.com/2020/09/two-fragments-of-fragments-from.html
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