Background
As I sit down to do my legally-mandated Cyber Monday shopping, I’d like to talk about a somewhat-less-commercial aspect of Christmas.
Last night, my wife and I attended the 51st annual Messiah sing-along at Clarendon United Methodist Church. 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. 2022). The phrase used last night was “it’s been running longer than Cats”.
Talented soloists do the hard parts, while the audience serves as the chorus. The audience ranges from excellent singers, to people like me (I can usually make it through the notes), to folks that are mostly lost, most of the time. But it’s all good. If you can’t sing the 16th notes, no problem. Just sing what you can.
In a typical year, in the Washington DC area, there are easily a half-dozen Messiah sing-alongs to choose from. I suspect the same is true for most cities across the U.S.
I’d like to say that it’s a way for us to kick off the holiday season on a more spiritual note. But, really, for us, it’s more about the music.
My wife and I agree that, should we ever have access to a time machine, our first act would be to go back in time and kill Katherine Kennecott Davis, thus saving the Western world from untold billions of mind-numbing parum-pa-pum-pums.
The report
We attended this sing-along for several years ending in 2019. Every pre-COVID-year, 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.
Choral singing is such a risk for spread of COVID that we hesitated to return to it. Even after calculating the odds (I crudely figured a 1-in-300 chance of picking up a COVID infection there), it still felt a little iffy. I had to wonder if we were just being wimps about this. Seems like almost everything is back to almost normal,despite continued new COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths that would be considered high during any other part of the pandemic.
We’re going back to this one, in the era of endemic COVID, because they require masks. Near as I can tell, none of the other sing-alongs in the area do that. I briefly went over why choral singing is such a risk for spread of COVID-19 in my last post on this (Post #1638). So the masks seem prudent, to me.
Turns out, we are far from alone in hesitating to return to mass choral singing.
I would guess that the church was less than half-full last night. In addition, the church had set up a broadcast for those who wished to attend virtually.
Moreover, the composition of the audience had changed. By eye, there was less gray hair. By show of hands, more than half were there for the very first time. Only a handful of persons in the audience were multi-decade veterans of this event.
In hindsight, I interpret that as showing that many of the church’s aging, veteran singers decided not to attend in person. Which makes a lot of sense, if you think about who is most at risk.
But is nevertheless a shame. It suggests to me that if the current new-case levels really are the “endemic” or long-term level of COVID in the population, then this event will never fully recover from the pandemic. It’s an event that largely catered to an elderly audience, but now carries an inherently high risk of COVID-19 infection. That’s just not a winning combination in the era of endemic COVID.
Whether or not the newcomers will eventually repopulate that sing-along, it’s far too soon to tell. I give Clarendon UMC credit for soldiering on. I dropped a wad of cash in the collection basket on my way out, because it can’t be cheap to hire a small orchestra plus soloists. But unless the level of COVID in circulation falls greatly, I suspect that this will only survive in its current, greatly reduced, form.
As for the other sing-alongs in the area, my wife is uncomfortable attending unless masks are required. The science says that singing generates as much aerosols as coughing. In this era, do you really want to stand in a big room full of people continuously coughing, and none of them wearing masks?
Ah, yeah, I think that’s where we draw the line. At least at the current level of COVID-19 incidence.
The issue of mandatory masks for mass choral events cuts both ways. We wish some other Messiah sing-alongs would follow Clarendon’s lead on the issue of masks. But, I guess, it’s a question of whether the organizers of those events figure they’d lose more audience by requiring it, than not. Maybe with a younger audience, no mandatory masks is the attendance-maximizing decision. Last night, though, I’m pretty sure that masks were key to the modest level of attendance that was achieved.
