The Gazebo Group: How 5 Choristers survived a pandemic

We were 6 months into a pandemic that had already gone on longer than anyone had thought it would.  A curious email appeared in my inbox – a call from a fellow despondent choir member, wondering if anyone in her choral circle wanted to gather outdoors and sing Renaissance music together.  My interest was piqued, as my heart was missing group singing more than it missed anything else the pandemic had taken from us, but the proposed weekly date and timing didn’t work for me. 

For the next few weeks, I read with curiosity the email updates that came from Jane after each gathering, and thought how lovely it was that a small handful of people had found a way to come together and sing safely despite the various stages of lockdown we were finding ourselves in.

The updates came with vivid and intriguing descriptions of each week’s gathering:

“We met up, sang a Christmas carol (and got compliments from passers by) and then worked on Sicut Cervus by Palestrina. Even though our numbers were small, we were so happy to be singing together and our spirits were high.”

“Last week's gathering was the opposite of illustrious or spectacular. It was King Lear on the heath weather - driving rain, cold, and miserable. I turned up but the rest of you had the sense to stay home! I met some interesting people (…), sang Sicut Cervus to the rain, and went home slightly sodden at 6 p.m.”

The image of my solitary choir member singing to the rain was simultaneously tragic and yet indicative of a strange kinship that I could no longer ignore.  The following week, I made my inaugural walk from my home to a nearby park that, unbeknownst to be at the time, would become a weekly pilgrimage over the next year.

The heart of the choral singer is a complex one to describe.  It is not simply that we “love singing” – if it were only that, singing alone in the shower would suffice, and a pandemic that deemed group singing to be one of the most ‘dangerous’ activities would not have affected us so. 

“Why don’t you just join a virtual choir?” was a comment I heard often from well-meaning, non-choral friends.  As lovely and peculiar as it is to sing alone by yourself in your living room while watching other floating heads silently doing the same on your computer screen, it does not come close to the rhythmic joining of your breath with others’ breaths, the melding of your notes against the choral harmonies of others’ notes, and the intangible mystery of so many individual voices somehow becoming one cohesive entity.

As I walked across the park to our meeting place of choice, I briefly looked around for by-law enforcement or members of the public ready to inform us how ‘illegal’ our group gathering was.  No such phantoms appeared.  It was a desolate, empty field, with perhaps a lone dog walker in the distance.  The autumn air was crisp, and the trees around us had mostly shed their leaves.

I approached the designated meeting spot, and, seeing no one, sat down on some concrete steps to wait.  Perhaps the others had decided that we shouldn’t, in fact, be engaging in such dangerous, law-breaking activity.

But I needn’t have worried.  At promptly 4:30pm, Jane appeared in the distance, squinting across the field at me, carrying a large basket.  I stood up; smiled and waved.  “Ana!” she beamed at me.  “You’re here!”

Soon after, a handful of others arrived.  There were 6 of us that day – 4 short of the current allowable gathering limit.  We stood 6 feet (or more) apart.  Jane distributed sheets of music from the aforementioned basket. 

And, just like that, we sang.

How do I explain to you what that moment felt like? 

To join my voice to the voices of others after so long.  To breathe in sync with the breath of others.  To hear woven harmonies all around me.  Those first few notes, my eyes filled with tears – but there was no time for that.  There was serious sight-reading to do.  Black dots and lines of notes flooded my mind like old familiar friends, and the part of my brain that knows how to automatically sync in time to a communal rhythm turned on like a glowing flame.  It did not matter that the wind whipped our sheets of music, that the cold air made our fingers numb.  We made our way through a dizzying amount of 4-part Renaissance music, oblivious to the elements and the occasional passerby.

We were singing!  Together.  The hour passed much too quickly. 

The weekly emails from Jane continued:

“Greetings!  We must have looked like miners last week as we shone lights of various sizes and positions onto our sheet music which kept threatening to be blown away by the wind. And we shared the bandshell last week with minors who were skateboarding. Accommodating minors who did their stunts alongside our rounds.  Please feel free to join us tomorrow, Thursday, from 4:30-5:30 p.m. as usual! We will be starting with some rounds and a Christmas carol and then attempting to work on the longest piece we have ever tried: Civitas Sancti Tui by William Byrd. We will see how far we get! It is haunting and the words are about the city (Zion) being desolate. A lamentation, which somehow seems appropriate for what we are all going though now.  Dress warmly! Sheet music and candy will be provided!”

As the weeks progressed, it became clear that a stalwart group of 5 of us were consistently showing up, week after week, ready with music in hand to sing no matter the weather.  We were, unbeknownst to us, forming a curious bond over something that was a mutual shared passion.

As one of us wrote in retrospect: “Eventually, however, as the winter tightened its grip, it became obvious that something amazing and wonderful was happening. The response to the weather worsening was the emergence of a small group of people who had obviously come to share a common belief and commitment, that we would sing, every week. But in some way the commitment to sing every week represented a commitment to other things too, to a way of living and a way of being, individually and with each other.”

Ted’s words above describe very succinctly what the source of our bond truly was, beyond simply a mere shared love of singing choral music.  A commitment to a way of being.

October turned into November, which turned into December.  The location of our initial gatherings was moved several blocks down the road to another park, with an 8-sided Gazebo that could shelter us a bit more from the elements.  This became our permanent home for the next year.  As the weeks went on, our 4:30pm start meant we started with fading daylight and finished in complete darkness. 

We developed a pattern – while we still had daylight, we tackled the more challenging pieces first.  I was often the one who ended up 'conducting', which mostly consisted of waving my bright blue mittened hand up and down to keep us on a steady beat.  Whenever there was a page turn in the music, I momentarily had to stop conducting while I quickly removed my mitten, turned the page, frantically tried to keep singing in time, and put the mitten back on so I could keep going. 

As the light faded, we would pull out our little headlamps or booklights so we could still see our music.  When it was really cold, we would hop in place in between songs.  Most days, we sang alone, completely unnoticed by the few who happened to be walking through the park in the dark. 

Occasionally, though, we did manage to attract a micro-audience.

A toddler wearing a bright neon pinny that broke away from his daycare group taking a walk and ran over to see what on earth we were doing.  The teacher followed along with the other two children and they stood there and listened to us sing a few songs before continuing on their walk. 

A boy and his father, attracted either by the bobbing of our headlamps or our disembodied voices in the dark, also came over one night.  The young boy clapped after each song - we waved at him and smiled, though we doubted he could see us.

A lone man walking his dog through the park, who stopped a distance away and listened for a little bit before continuing on.

In the midst of strange and uncertain times, this tiny little ad-hoc choir of crazy people willing to stand outdoors in winter's cold and darkness and join our voices together in lovely harmonies kept me sane.  Kept us all sane.  And who were ‘we’, exactly?  A teacher, a choir director, a music librarian/church administrator, a busy mother of 2 young children, and me - a pregnant behaviour analyst/choral singer.

Together, we managed to cover most 4-part music by having an Alto, a Bass, 2 Sopranos, and a Soprano-on-Tenor.  We sightread whatever we could get our hands on, always doing a mix of brand new pieces each week and going over a variety of favourites.  Over the course of the time we sang together, we worked out way through over 60 pieces.  Palestrina, Byrd, Vasquez, Lassus, Bach, Pitoni, Rachmaninov.  A dizzying array of Masses, Ave Verums, Cantate Dominos.  Portuguese polyphony, madrigals, Sacred Harp, hymns, modern liturgical music, spirituals, chants, rounds.

All of this while straining our ears to listen to each other standing so much further away than any choir is used to, keeping our music from flying away in the wind, keeping headlamps pointed at the score, and occasionally even conducting with a glowstick out of desperation to stay in time in the dark.

It was beautiful madness.  And I loved it.

One dark night in January, we acquired an audience of 3.  They lingered, and chatted with us between songs, wanting to know who we were and what on earth we were doing there.  They seemed drawn to us, to the magic we were creating... starved, almost, for beauty, for live music, for human connection.  Everything the pandemic had taken from us.

A woman passed by, stopped, and said "I just wanted to tell you something."  We all held our breaths, afraid she was going to point out we were breaking the law, that we were more than 5, that we shouldn't be gathering.  Instead she simply said "You all sound so beautiful" and continued her walk.

We exhaled.  

By the end of January, light finally started to return.  No longer were headlamps needed.  We survived the darkest of winter, and it was so vividly apparent to us, so striking; we all just marvelled at it, at being able to see our music by the end of it, at no longer being disembodied voices in the dark, but real and present and defiant - not defiant of the law, but of despair.  We had created a tiny island of sanity and refuge in our lives amidst massive uncertainty.

As Covid waves rose and fell, restrictions ebbed and flowed along with them.  For several weeks, it became illegal to gather outdoors with ANY one at all.  We briefly hesitated – would this be the end of the Gazebo Group?  We showed up that first week after the new restrictions were implemented, looked around briefly for by-law enforcers hiding in the bushes, and, seeing none, continued the business of singing as usual.

Winter gave way to spring, and spring to early summer.  One warm day, when restrictions about gathering limits had lifted slightly above zero, we found ourselves sharing the Gazebo with a group of 6 energetic children, running around, shouting, riding bicycles and scooters.  We simply moved ourselves off to the side, passed around some new music, and sang as we always did.  When we finished our first piece, we were startled to turn around and find all 6 children had assembled themselves on the ground in a straight line, and had been quietly listening to our “concert”.  They beamed at us as we turned around, and gave us a smattering of applause, telling us we were “really good”.

Surprised and a little humbled, we acknowledged them, and continued on with our singing, receiving a round of applause from tiny hands each time.  What was it that caused those young children to assemble themselves, unprompted by an adults, and quietly listen to an impromptu ‘concert’ of Renaissance music from a handful of strangers?  Was it the pandemic, that had isolated us for so long from each other?  The novelty of people singing outdoors for no apparent purpose?  The sound of the music itself?  Whatever it was, it was definitely a special moment.

You have to understand.  Life during the pandemic was not like what we know now, or have always known.  Those two years, we were like ghosts.  Disembodied versions of ourselves, trying to float through whatever this life was now.  Hugging your grandmother was illegal; so was a child playing on a swing.  The complete unknown of what we were all thrown into, collectively, has changed us in ways we don’t yet fully understand.  The world around us is back to normal; yet our experiences from the past two years were anything but normal.  How do they fit into our current lives?  What place does an ad-hoc group of outdoor renaissance singers have in this post-pandemic world?  What do we still carry with us from that time of madness and beauty?

This little group and our experience together under the Gazebo changed us all in some way.  It kept us sane and connected during a time when there was no stability in our lives, when everything was unknown, when everything we loved and needed most in our lives, connection and closeness, was taken away from all of us.  It was no small comfort to know that every Thursday at 4:30pm, there would be a handful of others waiting to sing together, no matter the situation around us.

We took a small hiatus over the summer, as all choirs do.  The world was starting to open up somewhat from all the restrictions, and we all had social and travel engagements for the first time in over a year.

Nevertheless, as fall approached and another covid surge with it (with accompanying restrictions on gathering), we met again in early September and continued our weekly gatherings, singing as the evenings grew cooler again, and wind and leaves blew around us.  This was familiar by now; a rhythm and connection with the elements, the music and each other, that kept calling us together.

One day in late October, we came together for our usual singing, and realized with a pang of bittersweetness that this would be the Gazebo group’s last gathering.  Our lives were pulling us in different directions – a move to a new home several hours away, a baby about to be born, a friend in hospital that needed weekly visiting, the start-up of church choir administrative duties. 

Jane, in true Jane fashion, brought us all hot chocolate to hold on to while we sang, to keep our hands warm.  We sang all of our old favourites from the past year, with perhaps more energy and passion than we ever had, knowing it was our last time together.

One of our favourite pieces to sing was actually a Christian folk hymn from the American South: Wondrous Love.  We had early on adapted the lyrics to suit our present predicament – instead of singing “and when from death we’re free”, we had modified the lyrics to: “And when from Covid we’re free, we’ll sing on, we’ll sing on… and when from Covid we’re free, we’ll sing on.”  It was our mantra, a prayer for the future, something to give us hope.

On this last day of our singing together, I requested a new modification, to which everyone obliged, and we sang this:  “And since from Covid we’re free, we’ll sing on, we’ll sing on… and since from Covid we’re free, we’ll sing on!”

There were teary-eyed hugs goodbye as we parted for the last time, and made our slow ceremonial walk towards our cars across the leaf-strewn park.  When I got home, I looked at the calendar and realized that it had been exactly a year to the day that I had joined this strange and wonderful group.

As I sit here reminiscing, a year later, I look out my window and see yellow, red, and orange leaves blowing in the wind, just like they did that day.  The pandemic is not exactly over, but restrictions have lifted and our lives have returned to somewhat of a state of normalcy.  This very evening, I have a dress rehearsal for a choral concert tomorrow – a sure sign that life as we used to know it has definitely returned.

And yet, despite the return of regular choral activities, the memory of the Gazebo Group lives on, and tugs at my heartstrings in a way I cannot explain.  What we created, by coming together in such a time of uncertainty, was something that I fear I have failed, still, to capture in words, despite taking a year to work on describing who and what we were. 

We were a beacon of light to each other in a very dark time.  And in a world where every moment, good or bad, is captured via digital means, there exists no record of our weekly singing, no video clips on anyone’s phones, not even a still photo.  Was it a dream, then, these gatherings I speak of, with music sheets flying in the wind and headlamps bobbing in the dark? Certainly no sane person would engage in such madness, and definitely not for an entire year.

Who knows – if there is ever another pandemic, I definitely know where I will be going every Thursday afternoon.  I think, even without prior planning, that 4 other people will somehow also be there.  We will just know.

And if you are ever taking a walk in a park, some warm and bright spring day, chilly fall afternoon, or frigid and windy dark winter evening, and notice a gazebo in the distance, maybe walk a little closer.  Listen for us. And remember that we existed.