How Montreal Gospel Choir overcame COVID and had a very successful 10th season
In the spring of 2020 we had just completed our 24 hour choir getaway to Brome Lake when Quebec introduced the first shutdown measures meant to keep COVID19 from overwhelming the hospital system. We had one more « in person » rehearsal before we switched to Zoom-based rehearsals. Seeing other members on screen helped to maintain the connections we had built and we were able to encourage each other in this new strange environment, but a choir that functions with multi-voice harmonies cannot thrive in the Zoom environment where only one person can sing at a time. So, the 9th season of MGC ended with an online party toward the beginning of May but not the usual concert finale.
Over the summer, Carol regrouped and started sounding out the members about whether they would want to return to a new season in September where there was no promise that we could practise together let alone have concerts. An encouraging number of our members were up for going into this unknown together. So we began our 10th anniversary season. September rehearsals began live, with special singers masks, much hand-washing and disinfecting and 2 metre distancing between singers. The choir of 68 (that many returned!) was split into an early 6pm practice and a 7:45pm practice time slot and when the gathering limits in churches were reduced from 50 to 25 people we just asked some people to volunteer each week to attend the rehearsal by the simultaneous Zoom that would allow them to hear both Carol leading and the other live choir members singing. Much better than having everyone at home participating in a Zoom call. Our tight COVID protocol, good ventilation (windows open on both sides of the practice facility) and not a little bit of prayer enabled us to get to Christmas without having any spread of COVID as a result of the choir rehearsals. We had to settle for a small representation of MGC singers joining with Jireh Gospel Choir on a Christmas online concert project. We were able to perform before 1000 households by putting this Christmas concert on the internet.
January brought the start of the 3rd wave (or was it the 2nd?) so we stayed at home and tried to provide a variety of experiences to our choir members by introducing various challenges to individual members interpreting our gospel repertoire. It is a connected choir, so our Facebook Just Us group was very active, Zoom was used extensively to maintain community, not just for our weekly practices. And sometime in March we successfully launched the brilliant idea that all who wanted to perform together would be formed into a smaller choirs that could rehearse together under the 25 person limit with the goal of recording a concert finale for our 10th season. Over 50 choir members said « I do (want to perform) » so Carol balanced the voices into 3 MGC choirs and we had 4 Saturday rehearsals in April that gave every choir their separate rehearsal time and got the last ones home before the 8pm curfew.
There is an expression in French which applies well to the character of my wife, Carol. « Elle est quelqu’une qui fonce dans la vie. » There are, no doubt, many choirs who have had to forego singing together for over a year now. Some are school choirs and the directors, even if they wanted to maintain some aspect of normality in their choir life, would be restricted by the policy of their institutions. If we were in that situation this would have been an entirely down experience for us. Because this is what we do – we rehearse and we perform. This becomes the basis for a very strong community choir culture. If this was taken away from us, not only Carol, but each member would have had a vital part of their life taken away from them. Carol took advantage of all the opportunities when they presented themselves, remained flexible and this resulted in an entirely successful choir season. I am so proud of Carol, the dozen choir leaders, section leaders who took on greater roles and each member singer of MGC. Together we overcame COVID, and sealed the victory by recording a concert of 14 songs performed with an amazing live band. We are asking our friends and family all over the world to come (online) and see the result. Please join us by buying a ticket: https://thepointofsale.com/tickets/mgc10
It occurred to me this morning while I was sitting at breakfast enjoying the “compote de pommes” that I had just “confectionné” that the annual pilgrimage that Carol and I made to the Gault Nature Reserve in St. Hilaire on Tuesday this week really made a nice melding of our parents family culture / the Ted Carol family culture / and the Québec culture.
I have a memory from my youth where my dad took a paper bag of black walnuts and we went down to the workbench in the basement and left the bag there for them to dry out. Later on (months?) we might have used the bench vise, though I’m not sure we had one of those in my childhood years, so, more likely we used a hammer, and cracked those hard nuts open to get at the nut meats. That was my first taste of a nut that my dad knew from his childhood. The Isaiah Dettweiler house had a large, impressive specimen of a
Dad liked black walnut trees and planted some on his own property because they were a symbol to him of something he wanted to pass on to his children. That was the tree that held prominence at the house where Dad grew up and I can only believe that Dad valued his upbringing and would want to remember it. The work involved to get at the nutmeats said that there is something very good at the end of working hard especially if it is something that you can share with the others in your family. Dad knew what he was doing when he put away that bag of walnuts for a future time and he wanted his children to know this valuable truth too.
On Wednesday morning, the day of Dad’s funeral service, I woke early and went downstairs with my iPad to write out my eulogy in full. A search for the words of the verse I had gone to bed meditating on turned it up in Psalm 116:15. I have a developed preference for quoting complete passages of scripture, whenever possible, and I saw that this Psalm had both several All-Star verses (the type we might highlight) and had an overall theme which is more than compatible with describing the life experience of one who “calls on the Lord”. I decided early to read the Psalm in Eugene Peterson’s “The Message” version, not because it is any stronger or says more what I’d like to say in that version but because I know my weakness and how I can become incapable of continuing to speak when Scripture slays me with its “sharper than a two-edged sword” nature. Eugene Peterson uses different words and perhaps I thought that these words would be somewhat duller to my emotions. So there I was, in a different way than usual, using the words of Scripture for my purposes.
Among the witty one-liners that Dad so often used in Karen’s biographical exercise book to avoid the hard work of filling out the facts, there are, in fact, a few interesting facts. It is recorded that Dad made Mom’s acquaintance (for the first time?) when he was invited to Cecil Mader’s Sunday dinner (dad’s employer from 1943 through to 1946) along with the [all-girl] Arthur Hachborn family who went to the same Mennonite Brethren in Christ Church in Breslau as the Maders. Mom verified [in a phone call today] that this would have been when she was 15 or 16 years old. I said in the eulogy that Hitler delayed dads life, but that God uses for good what was intended for evil. I’ve no doubt that Harold took note of the young woman, Margaret, on that Sunday dinner in 1943. I can imagine him contemplating if God was beginning to call him to the church that in 1947, after the war, changed its name to the “United Missionary Church”. A girl hardly 16 is much too young to be a wife, however, and Mom was busy boarding in Kitchener to continue her education at K.C.I. The next we hear of Dad and Mom is Christmas of 1948 when the youth groups join to go carolling. Margaret is now 20 years old and Harold is not going to miss his opportunity to drive Margaret home and begin a 4 year courtship.
I remember some things very clearly – I cut my finger on a blade of glass during the visit with the real estate agent – we went on a tour of the lake conducted by a teenage Ken Dorsch – and I could tell you where I was in the backyard in Breslau when Dad brought home the boat from Maryhill marina; that’s when I knew for sure that we had a cottage. Mom provided some details this morning that allow me to flesh my theories out into a fairly well substantiated story.
but his young adult experience at 20 years old was like a lifetime of summer camp rolled into one experience (except that it was much chillier than Mishewah ever was on the coldest August morning as his service there began in November). The autograph book of dad’s that the men at Montreal River Camp signed shows that some close camp connections were made through the experience there.
Whenever I pick up a copy of the Muskoka Sun or alternatively, similar publications put out vaunting the real estate of the Laurentians, near Montreal, I start dreaming, having dad’s same thirst to own a piece of the rock known as Canadian Shield. I have Thoreau drilled into me, however, informing my spirit that I don’t need to own it to enjoy it and that the danger of real estate is that it might own me, but I still like to entertain for brief periods the notion that there is a cottage built on a rock next to a lake that was meant for me.
The impulse to collect stamps is labelled “philately”. Between the ages of ~9 years old and 15, I possessed that rather solitary passion and it might be a major contributing factor in the development of my adventurous nature. That need to explore goes hand in hand with a lack of fear of the unknown, in my case, and it brought me to Montreal, ideal home for adventurers…, and stamp collectors as I discovered today.
After a slow browse through 4 or 5 thematic albums, I was getting the hang of the system and decided that I would follow up on a recent read of a sort of autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. starting with stamps from Africa honouring him. The albums of African countries, from North to South, Angola to Zanzibar piled before me failed to yield up a single Martin Luther King stamp, though I remember reading that he did travel there. Finally in the Togo Republic, I found the civil rights hero’s image on a stamp. I know the obvious is to look for MLK in USA, but since presidents and prime ministers like John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill can be found everywhere in the stamps of the world, I expected the same for this martyred civil rights hero. Not the case.