4 minute read
THE MUSIC NEVER
#LEHMusicLivesOn
The pandemic has seen concert halls, theatres and stages across the UK fall empty. Live performances have been one of the most-missed casualties of Covid-19. In schools, with Government recommendations restricting singing and playing together, it was time to get creative in order to let music live on reveals LEH Director of Music Miranda Ashe.
In the first lockdown, in March 2020, the LEH Music Department created three virtual choir performances by recording videos and audio for Cantata and the Holles Singers to learn their lines at home.
We sent these out together with scans of the music and the singers recorded their individual lines from home and uploaded them to a google drive. Our producer then edited and mixed these and we synched all the videos to create three virtual performances.
The first was a performance of ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ to commemorate VE Day. The second was a life-affirming mashup called ‘The Bright Side’ and our final project was a performance of Howard Goodall’s ‘Loving Kindness’, written in honour of the sacrifices made by the NHS workers throughout the pandemic.
In September, we returned to school, but music was constrained by rehearsals in year-group bubbles, leaving teachers mostly able only to run small-scale repertoire within those bubbles. So we decided to try broadcasting simultaneous rehearsals to all members of, for example, the Symphony Orchestra, and then record in year-bubbles and multitrack it all to produce a final performance.
This has implications in terms of hours and effort needed – and indeed, we found ourselves making many recordings for this – when you have a grade six tuba player and diploma violinist in Year 7, it’s clear that recording them together is going to be carnage… We discovered that creative thinking helped enormously!
There is an open-air courtyard in the centre of the department so we put the flutes in the rooms opening off it with the doors ajar and the conductor with one year-bubble in amongst the ferns.
(We call it the baby giraffe pen on our rehearsal schedule.)
We also made use of an antechamber (well, the pupils call it a cupboard actually, but antechamber sounds so much classier) between our main rehearsal room and our theatre and put a separate year-bubble in there so they could join in live with rehearsals in the main room. We banished one unfortunate child in Year 7 in Symphony Orchestra to the corridor so she could play with a Lower 6 rehearsal within the main room.
We added to this a marquee outside for the first half of term, so we could sing in a reckless and cavalier manner (still distanced and in year-bubbles though) and the mission to keep LEH Music live was up and running, even if it was arctic out there from time to time! We told anyone who complained that it was necessary to suffer to be an artist or else their performances would lack depth. The next step for the larger-scale projects was to set out a recording schedule to lay down basic foundation backing tracks for each piece. Three days of recording, editing and mixing later, the tracks had clicks added to them by our brilliant engineer and producer, ready for the year-bubble recording sessions.
Our main rehearsal room was transferred into Abbey Road for the recording fortnight and the wide-eyed excitement as pupils saw the set-up for the first time was a joy to see. The musicians came in full concert dress, listened to the foundation tracks through headphones and were recorded (audio and video) in their bubbles. Symphony Orchestra alone has seven year-bubbles plus, so this was a long and complex project!
We learnt that the pupils must always have one headphone on the ear and We’re currently putting the finishing one off, or they’ll sing/play out of tune touches to the Rock, Pop and Jazz without exception – even the most Concert and can’t wait to get everyone accomplished ones. And then finally, back in a room having real, live it was over to the technical wizardry rehearsals!! I have a lump in my throat of our producer who multitracked and just thinking about it. blended it all together for countless hours to produce the end result. LEH School Cantata Virtual Choir sing
Using this approach, we managed to produce an online Winter Concert and Carol Service and maintain a sense of normality and continuity in the musical year.
As we were locked down again in January 2021, we returned to the musicians recording in their own homes. The first project was Cabaret Night and we had recorded band backings with some professionals to make it all the more exhilarating. It was a devastatingly slick and professional online release with choral numbers, ensembles and solos!
Where to see #LEHMusicLivesOn
Search for the hashtag on social media or visit the LEH School YouTube channel and look in the Video’s section: bit.ly/LEHYouTube bit.ly/LEHACabaretNightIn bit.ly/LEHRockPopandJazz21
