Background
Two nights ago my wife and I attended the 52nd annual Messiah sing-along at Clarendon United Methodist Church. Because we do this every year, and I write it up, I can directly compare last year’s sing-along to this year’s.
For those of you unfamiliar with this tradition, Messiah is a baroque oratorio about the birth and death of Christ. The words are straight out of the King James Bible (ca. 1611). The music is straight out of the early 18th century (ca. 1741). Despite these handicaps, the Christmas portion of it is still widely performed at this time of year (ca. 2023). To reach for the LCD here, it’s where the Hallelujah Chorus comes from.
This is now one of my acid tests of how well we, as a society, have gotten past COVID. That’s because a) sing-alongs are an extremely high-risk event for spread of airborne disease, and b) the typical in-person participant for this event, in the past, tended to be elderly.
Why are sing-alongs high risk? Turns out, singing produces as many airborne droplets as coughing (Nature: Scientific Reports). From an infectious disease standpoint, there’s little difference between standing in a church full of people singing full-voice, and standing in a room full of people continuously coughing. One of the worst mass COVID outbreaks at the start of the pandemic was from a choir rehearsal in Mount Vernon, Washington (reference).
Full pews, full lot.
So, how did this year’s Messiah sing-along go? Short answer: Approaching normal. Details follow.
Every year that we attended, through 2019, the church was more-or-less packed. To the point where we’d come early to make sure we could get a parking place. There was a lot of gray hair in the audience. And a large portion of the audience had been attending that Clarendon UMC Messiah sing-along for years, if not decades.
During the pandemic, in-person sing-alongs stopped. I believe there was no in-person Messiah performance at Clarendon UMC in 2020 or 2021. This was, after all, an era where mainstream U.S. churches stopped all singing during services (see Post #708), for the reasons outlined in the footnote section just above. I believe Clarendon kept their tradition alive by having some sort of virtual performance during those years.
In 2022, Clarendon resumed its in-person Messiah sing-along, with masks mandatory. That was the only Messiah sing-along we attended that year, and that was specifically because masks were mandatory. My writeup is in Post #1642.
At that point, a mass sing-along was still quite risky, and the attendance reflected that. The church was only about half-full, almost all of the aging veterans of that event stayed away, and more than half the audience was there for the first time.
When I wrote all that up, I figured this was effectively the end of such mass sing-alongs for the post-COVID era. The risk of disease transmission was large enough to discourage participation.
But I was wrong.
Last night (2023):
- The church was full (but not packed).
- There was a lot of gray hair in the audience
- Veterans of prior sing-alongs outnumbered newcomers.
- Masks were few and far between.
- There was still a virtual attendance option.
In short, it was almost a complete return to normalcy. Where normal is defined by how things were way back in 2019. The only nod to being in the endemic-COVID era was the smattering of masks, and the option to view the performance at home rather than attend in person. Otherwise, the parking lot was full, and the pews were filled.
Here’s the weird little kicker about all that: There’s almost as much COVID in circulation in this area now (Thanksgiving 2023) as there was then (Thanksgiving 2022). We’ve just learned to turn a blind eye to it and get on with our lives.
Source: Virginia Department of Health.
