Seattle-area choirs return to performing but things are not the same

Like the sound of music from another room, laughter echoes in the great dome of St. James Cathedral. Members of Seattle Pro Musica crack jokes behind their face masks as they file, precisely spaced, into a crescent shape around the altar.

The delight of the choir members rehearsing together last month was nearly enough to forget March 6, 2020, when Seattle Pro Musica’s canceled dress rehearsal left Lynnwood’s Trinity Lutheran Church devoid of the friendly chatter and soaring notes the choir usually brings.

The choir and its Puget Sound-area peers have accomplished a lot since that fateful week when pandemic shutdowns began — piecing together concert videos in the style of a “Brady Bunch” intro, donning coats and gloves to rehearse with open windows, perfecting enunciation while singing behind multilayered cloth — but, so far, a return to normalcy is not on that list. Even as performances have resumed, there have been many changes to the way choral groups rehearse and perform, and heavy precautions keep members from socializing how they once did.

On top of it all is a leftover hesitancy around choirs that’s been present since March 10, 2020, when 53 members of the Skagit Valley Chorale left a rehearsal infected with the coronavirus in an event that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention later labeled as a superspreader, one of the country’s first.

The same could have happened with Seattle Pro Musica, had it not been for a board member who advised against rehearsal after returning home from Italy.

“Later we discovered that, in fact, we did have a couple of choir members who had COVID,” said Karen Thomas, artistic director. “We could very easily have had an extremely difficult superspreader event.”

Paul Caldwell, artistic director of the Seattle Men’s and Women’s choruses, said it just as easily could have been his choir, too, if one of its members, an emergency room doctor, hadn’t advised against having rehearsal. 

“It was just dumb luck,” he said. “[He’s] an ER doc in Issaquah where they started receiving the nursing home patients, and then he noticed that they started receiving first responders who had been in the nursing home. He was sounding the alarm.”

Choirs, Caldwell said, have suffered a degree of cultural trauma after becoming such a large part of the conversation around the spread of the coronavirus, and they are still figuring out how to bounce back.

“At the beginning, really, we were just going about living our lives as normal people, and all of a sudden, we were sort of Typhoid Mary in Newsweek magazine,” he said. “I think we have been less sure than other art forms, whether or not our art form would ever be able to come back, because of that.”

The science of singing

The Skagit Valley event was a wake-up call for many organizations, but especially for choirs. Adam Burdick, artistic director of the Skagit Valley Chorale, said he became a spokesperson for safety after his choir’s outbreak and worked with the Greater Seattle Choral Consortium to share knowledge among its 90 member choirs. 

“My explicit intention was to stake out a position that was as safe as I could imagine it to be based on the science that we trusted and the discussions between the board of the chorale and myself,” Burdick said. “Our decision making … helped other professionals kind of hold the line when they got pressure from others who wanted to be less careful.”

There’s a lot of conversation that precedes a choir practice these days: Mask or no mask? What type of mask? Does the room have enough ventilation? How far apart should members stand? How long can they be together? Should the conductor remove their mask or just talk louder? Answering these questions becomes easier with knowledge of the coronavirus’s spread.

When you use your vocal cords, they vibrate, producing small droplets that are carried out by exhaled air. The more aggressively your vocal cords vibrate, the more of these droplets are produced. Droplets are also larger when your sound volume is higher. For example, coughing produces much larger droplets than singing, and singing produces larger droplets than talking.  Loud, sustained singing can produce a high concentration of potentially infectious particles in the air, especially when there are multiple singers, said Igor Novosselov, a UW research associate professor with expertise in aerosol science.

Gravity can bring a larger droplet to the ground. A smaller droplet will be picked up by air currents, becoming an aerosol particle that can travel to you, despite your 6-foot distancing. If you have COVID-19, not all your droplets will necessarily have a viable virus in them, but some contain multiple, even in aerosol particles that are 1/1000th of a millimeter in size, he said.

“You’re thinking about the pea size versus the beach ball,” he said. “How many pea-sized particles can you put in the beach ball? It can be packed with this viral material, or it can be nothing there.”

It’s no surprise that one Skagit Valley Chorale member, unaware of an infection, was able to spread the virus to 52 others in the span of 2 1/2 hours.

Gail Broder, a member of Seattle Pro Musica, has helped shield her choir from these dangers using her expertise as the senior community engagement project manager at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where her HIV research team was redirected to study COVID vaccines early in the pandemic.

As well as she understands the science of coronavirus spread, Broder understands that the dangers of singing are a reality all choirs have had to deal with, whether they’ve been unlucky enough to have an outbreak or not. 

“Choirs joke all the time about spitting on each other, and it’s not intentional, but it does happen,” she said. “That’s just sort of, by definition, what singing involves.”

Choirs minus the confabs

Being in a choir isn’t what it used to be. Gone are the social snack breaks and the post-rehearsal drinks. “Hugs are fewer, and close confabs, too,” Burdick said.

Though King County’s mask mandate expired more than two months ago, many art organizations have not followed suit, including some choirs. Members of Burdick’s Skagit Valley Chorale can choose whether to wear a mask during rehearsals and performances, but they still distance about 6 feet. Rehearsal spaces can only fit about 70 singers, compared to the 125 singers they had pre-pandemic.

Seattle Pro Musica, on the other hand, requires masks and proof of vaccination for both rehearsals and concerts and is urging members to stay home if they have so much as a sniffle.

“[We] used to be much more lenient about allowing folks with colds or sniffles to come to rehearsal and sit off to the side; that’s a relic of the past,” said Katie Skovholt, executive director, adding that they stream rehearsals for those who can’t make it.

Rehearsals are also shorter, with all the windows open and breaks to run the air filters at full power and clear the room, Skovholt said. At concerts, there’s no longer an intermission — “to minimize milling about” — so performances are shorter, too.

The Seattle Men’s and Women’s choruses have been rehearsing masked and in person since September, with as many as 130 singers for Seattle Men’s Chorus and 50 for Seattle Women’s Chorus, Caldwell said, noting that these numbers are half of what they were pre-pandemic since many members have dropped out. In order to have 130 people physically distant, they rehearse in larger spaces than they used to.

Above requiring masks for all rehearsals and performances, members of those two choruses must wear specifically KN95 masks, a requirement that began with the emergence of the omicron variant in January.

Masks do impact the sound negatively, KN95s especially, but there’s not much that can be done, and “it’s still better than not singing at all,” Caldwell said.

Burdick said wearing masks makes diction slightly less clear, but it’s still perfectly acceptable. The real issue, he said, is the singers’ ability to get enough air. “I have modified pieces to shorten phrase lengths and allow more opportunities for breaths,” he said.

Seattle Pro Musica, whose 65 members wear singer’s masks, works harder on diction and focusing its sound, Skovholt said.

Singer’s masks, a product of the pandemic, have become a hot commodity. They have a structure and shape to create a chamber in front of the face, so the singers aren’t sucking in the mask’s fabric when they breathe, Broder said.

And, so far, the masks work, Skovholt said. Seattle Pro Musica had a dress rehearsal on a Friday and a concert that Saturday; after the concert, a member got a notification that they’d been exposed the previous Thursday and ended up testing positive.

“The whole choir had been exposed, singing together for multiple hours in an enclosed space,” Skovholt said. “We elected to test every participant. … We’re now beyond the incubation period and can safely say that nobody else in the chorus got COVID.”

The African American Cultural Ensemble, a choir out of the Northwest African American Museum, debuted in 2021, both as a way to provide camaraderie during the pandemic and to, hopefully, become an extra revenue model in the future.

The group’s first rehearsals were entirely virtual, on Zoom. Later on, the group “eased into socially distanced, masked in-person rehearsals in an open space, and some of that being outdoors,” said NAAM President and CEO LaNesha DeBardelaben. “And from there, the rehearsals have continued to be in person. But always mindful of following protocol safety protocols, COVID mandates and keeping everybody safe.”

With only 15 people performing together, it’s far easier to physically distance than it is for larger choirs, DeBardelaben said. Since distancing is simpler, members now take off their masks when actively singing, only wearing them when they exit and enter. 

The choir has also taken opportunities to sing outside when that felt safer. “We turned on Bluetooth and sang our hearts out,” DeBardelaben said.

“Normal costs a lot of money”  

Seattle Pro Musica’s post-concert audience survey shows that its mask requirement (for both singers and audiences) is a draw, with eager thanks from attendees who would not have come otherwise, Skovholt said. But audience numbers at most choirs still aren’t what they used to be.

“The conflict is that our singers and our audiences want us to appear normal, but we can’t afford to stay normal if they don’t come back because normal costs a lot of money,” Caldwell said.

For the Seattle Men’s and Women’s choruses, requiring masks at concerts is a double-edged sword, but it’s worth it.

“There are audience members who would not attend if masks weren’t required … but there are others who won’t attend events that require masks,” Caldwell said. “In the end, we are happy to comply with venue masking requirements. It creates a much safer environment for our singers.”

Burdick said the Skagit Valley Chorale will discuss more bold promotional efforts for the fall, but for now, he isn’t pushing hard to get audiences back.

“Our invitations to attend our May concerts were very ‘soft’ because it’s so important that audience members feel comfortable choosing the level of risk they are willing to accept to attend,” he said.

Moving forward, some choirs, like Seattle Pro Musica, are planning to maintain a hybrid of both in-person and virtual programming to keep the connections made with new audiences during the pandemic.

“We discovered that during the COVID times when we were doing virtual concerts, we had a lot of audience members who began to follow us from all over the world,” Thomas said. “Keeping that online presence is really nice for those people so they can watch from Korea, from India or just the East Coast of the U.S.”

The African American Choral Ensemble, which has performed both in virtual programs and in-person ones — including singing at a Kraken game and a Sounders game earlier this year — plans to do mainly in-person performances, but will also do some virtual ones, DeBardelaben said. Since, for now, ACE performs by invitation only, whether they do any virtual performances in the future depends on what kind of programs they’re invited to.

The Skagit Valley Chorale and Seattle Men’s and Women’s choruses, however, are done with virtual programming. By Caldwell’s June 2021 Pride concert, “you could not beg somebody to sit still or watch another virtual choir.”

“My best friends all over the country were releasing their virtual choirs, and I’m highly motivated to watch my friends’ shows because they’re my friends, and I’m still going like, ‘Do I have to sit through these?’”

As the choirs wrap up their 2021-22 seasons, the consensus is that while things could be better, they could very well be worse — things are “normal adjacent,” Caldwell says. 

At Seattle Pro Musica, they’re taking it day by day.

“We’re on a boat. It’s always rocking, we don’t know which way, where the waves are, where the rocks are,” Thomas said. “We’re just trying to stay afloat, and keep our little boat intact. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job being able to do that.”

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This coverage is partially underwritten by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust. The Seattle Times maintains editorial control over this and all its coverage.