In This Moment was a multi-year project spanning multiple media that was centered around a musical collaboration with the Gather Round Singers, taking place online through the COVID-19 lockdowns in Toronto between 2020 and 2022. The Gather Round Singers are a radically inclusive community choir that are a part of JumbliesTheatre. What this means is that anyone can join the choir at any time, regardless of age, ability, experience, or number of rehearsals before the performance.
In March of 2020, when the first of the COVID-19 lockdowns hit Toronto, the choir was forced to find a way to work remotely.By the summer of 2020, they had started to meet regularly on Zoom, and had invited me to write a project for them to sing while they had to meet online (at this point, we were expecting to be back singing in person by the fall).To get the choir online singing on Zoom, the Gather Round Singers developed a robust system to help participants, some of whom had never used a computer, or never had internet access at home, join the meeting and deal with unfamiliar technology. Each call wouldgenerally begin with a movement exercise and a vocal warmup before splitting into separate breakout rooms of between 5 – 15 participants each, with a few staff members in each room as well. Each room would be centered around a different activity or workshop, and participants would rotate to a new room every 20 – 25 minutes. For example, a typical rehearsal may have one breakout room dedicated to learning a new section of music, another breakout room dedicated to learning the signs in ASL for the same section, and a final breakout room with a movement workshop. The choir worked on multiple projects throughout the time we were developing In This Moment, so variations in activities and what kind of work we were doing were commonplace.
Three Scores, Three Iterations
In This Moment was a living piece that changed many times through its life cycle. We used a variety of different documents as 'scores' to remember and share information about how the piece works, and its structure.
A Google Drive Folder
Included in this folder are material for learning the various musical lines in the piece: lyric sheets, notation for those who read it, and audio recordings for those who learn by ear. There are also a number of outlines, and a document explaining the Imaginary Zoom Room workshop. This drive folder was our main 'document' for holding and explaining the piece in a way that all choir staff could quickly understand, and was made for the first iteration of the piece which was performed entirely on Zoom (with the choir and audience on the same call). This folder remained the main 'score' of In This Moment through the following hybrid performances as well.
A Spreadsheet & Standard Notation
The hybrid setting (most of the choir singing on zoom, with their output mixed with live singers and musicians for an in-person audience) introduced some complex logistical challenges, especially in communicating between the in-person singers and online choir. Shifra Cooper, the director of the choir, made this spreadsheet which we then filled out with a list of events. Since we had learned the piece in a sort of modular way, each small piece of material being a single workshop or a set of workshops, we could use this spreadsheet format to explain what each group was doing at each moment in the piece, who was cuing who, and how transitions between sections would work. We were familiar enough with each part of the piece that only the lyrics were necessary.
Additionally, this iteration of the piece included additional musicians - Theorbist Jonathan Stuchbery, as well as me performing on synthesizer. Since we were both more used to working with notation, I also put together a notated score for us to use as a secondary document. Click on the documents below to view both the spreadsheet and the notated score in more detail
A Quick Guide for Fiddle Accompaniment
The final iteration of In This Moment came together when lockdown restrictions in Toronto lifted enough that we could return to singing in person as a full group in May of 2022. On a whim, Shifra and I improvised an 'in person' version of the music we had been singing on Zoom for the previous two years. This ended up working very well, and gave us an opportunity to explore new ways of singing the music we had become so familiar with - as a sort of farewell to the strangeness of online music making we had become accustom to. Joining the choir as an accompanist was fiddler Áine Schryer-O'Gorman. We both accompanied the choir as a violin/viola duo. The final document we used was a short guide for accompaniment, with small pieces of notation when needed, but mostly just via text, to help guide our memory.
Credits:
Jumblies Theatre
Artistic director: Ruth Howard
General Manager: Sam Egan
Text:
assembled by Ruth Howard from 'Palaces for the People' by Eric Klinenberg on Chicago Heat Wave
Nextdoor CityPlace March 13, 2020
Words from the Gather Round Singers
ASL Lyrics: Tamyka Bullen
Gather Round Singers:
Director: Shifra Cooper
Manager: Ahmed Hegazy
ASL Interpretation: Latasha Lennox
Choir Staff:
Tijana Spasic, Catherine Moeller, Rakefet Arieli, Tasmeen Syed, Beth Helmers, Sharada Eswar
Vivien Ilion, Sam Rowlandson O'Hara, Natalie Fasheh, Animiikikwe Couchie, Karis Jones-Pard, Risa de Rege
Musicians:
Live singers:
Raneem Baraket, Lisette Cogdell, Natalie Fasheh, Pesch Nepoose, Ximena Huizi, Hodan Ibrahim
Theorbo: Jonathan Stuchbery
Online conducting: Sam Rowlandson-O'Hara
In-person conducting: Shifra Cooper
Violin: Áine Schryer-O'Gorman
Production at the Small Arms Inspection Building:
Creative Producer: Caroline Halloway
Stage Manager: Connor Bustamante
Technical Director: Steafan Hannigan
Technical Assistant and Audio Engineer: Cadman Brooks
Documentation presented on this page filmed and edited by:
Adrienne Marcus Raja, Cameron Montgomery, Dorian Pearce.
Commission for In This Moment was generously funded by the Ontario Arts Council
Imaginary Zoom Rooms
a sample workshop
We developed the zoom room mapping exercise in mid 2021. By this point we had become so used to meeting and making music in this space, that a choir member joining with a different wall in the background was an event that was cause for conversation. The mapping activity was simple, each member of the group call would describe something they were noticing in their space - it could be a sound, a sight, or otherwise. While each choir member was describing their space, an artist in the room was taking each element and painting them together into 'maps' of our imagined, collective, virtual space.
Remote Music Techniques
1. False Unisons
Making a concious effort to try and sing in unison results in a sort of 'blurring' of the line being sung, with timing being dependent on each choir members device and internet connection. Zoom's 'speaker' algorithm which tries to choose one primary speaker to be heard above other noises can also be heard, switching singers into the musical foreground, seemingly at random.
3. The Numbers Game
Instruction: Choose a number between 1 and 10. Count to that number in your head, and when you arrive, sing your line. Once you finish singing, begin counting again, and repeat.
More complicated versions of the numbers game can involve increasing or decreasing the number you count to each time, shifting the density of activity depending on which direction you count.
The numbers game was an activity originally made for building confidence for singing out in online spaces. We often used it as a vocal warmup, to prepare for singing online. In the final, in-person, iteration of In This Moment, it proved useful for simulating the sound world of the virtual space we had been singing in.
2. Changing Speed
Instruction: Begin singing the line as slowly as possible, gradually speed up until you are singing as fast as you possibly can, at which point, abruptly stop singing.
This technique allows us to hear a spectrum of sounds that latency produces in the choir. At slow speeds, the words are recognizable, small portions of words emerge in a sea of sonic activity - it is also possible to hear the subtle differences in each choir members devices' microphone and the acoustic space in which it is capturing sound. At fast speeds, the sound smears into a flurry of activity until choir members drop out.
When our computers connect, and begin to send sound and video to each other over the internet, we are creating one single interconnected sonic & visual space. The premise of this workshop was to try and represent this ephemeral virtual space as an imagined physical one. Later in the process of the piece, we used these images as inspiration for a group improvisation of sound and movement that marked the end of the performance.
Recording from the final performance of In This Moment, sung completely in person in July of 2022. Using the numbers game in the in-person version allowed us a familiar tool that was effective in creating similar effects to the ones latency caused in our all-too-familiar virtual singing space.
From the first 'hybrid' workshop performance of In This Moment in December 2021.
The online choir can be heard singing 'grabbing groceries, medication' overtop of the live singers and seen performing the ASL of the same line on the screen to the right.
An image showing the observations from a Zoom breakout room, and the resulting art of the imagined physical space (Painting by Sam Rowlandson-O'Hara)
A short clip of the movement and sound improvisation based on the art of Imaginary Zoom Rooms. The art can be seen on the top row, third from the right
Recordings:
Recordings of the fully online iteration from June 2021, and the hybrid performance in-person and online performance in February 2022 can be found
The recording of the fully in-person iteration, recorded in June 2022 is below
Grounds for Goodness
In This Moment was a part of Jumblies Theatre's larger Grounds for Goodness Project Grounds for Goodness was a large scale artistic research project spanning many projects, artists, and places. The premise of Grounds for Goodness was to explore the conditions under which, and the reasons why, people and groups of people do acts of good to others.