In common with every other amateur choir, ECMVC has been unable to meet and sing together. Nevertheless, thanks to a range of technology, many of the membership have been able to join together at least once a week, using Zoom – a virtual meeting system. Most weeks, MD Liz provides those who are able to join the meeting with warm up exercises and introductions to some of the new music we’ve purchased over recent months.
You can’t hear anyone else whilst we’re practising the songs, as the technology doesn’t cope at all well with the ‘latency’ of the internet – the time it takes for sounds and vision to reach others in the meeting. To make matters worse, this delay is different for everyone, so it’s important for everyone except Liz to be muted. However, we’ve not let this stop us from meeting every Tuesday evening using Zoom and we’ve at least been able to talk to one another and feel the benefit of Liz keeping our vocal chords in trim.
Since our last email newsletter, we’ve released two virtual choir videos. The first, Unchained Melody, brought together eight members to form an ECMVC mini-virtual choir, who each practised and recorded their own video of themselves singing to a guide track. These videos were then edited and brought together so that, in effect, we had an 8-person choir. Sadly, one of the eight, John Bescoby, died just two days after we released the video.
We were determined to produce a further video and dedicate this to John. This time, 16 singers braved the technology and produced Softly As I Leave You.
Links to these two videos are below. Please have a look at them and watch the second one through to the end, where a special dedication is made to John.
ECMVC hope you stay well and safe. We can’t wait to get back to singing together again…