Virtual Choirs, Human Bodies:
“Carillons a Musique”
June 26, 2020
“Then God said said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.”
Genesis 1:3
“See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is.”
Ephesians 5:15-17
We are in the middle of the fifth month of quarantine. The failure of the highest authorities to act quickly and with dispatch to control the spread of the virus, their abandonment of responsibility in the midst of crisis, and their malignant attempts to manipulate people and events to consolidate their hold on power even further are obvious even to the undiscerning. Overwhelmed by the gravity of the situation and teetering on the edge of despair, I have retreated inwards, tunneling into my center of gravity, intently focusing on finding inward light. But I am finding that no matter how deeply one burrows and penetrates things to locate the source of inner light, light has a way of bouncing off surfaces, reflecting things, and reaching outward and in this spirit, I must reflect about my experience of light in some very dark times.
The U.P. Cherubim and Seraphim had just finished a triumphant major concert for the second semester of 2019-2020 when the Covid 19 lockdown took place. We had said “goodbye” and “study well” to the kids who were revving up for their exams the next week and promised them cake and ice cream the week after the exams. Suddenly our lives were shut down and everyone was confined to quarters on the day of the first exam. I breathed a long sigh and thanked the Lord for the small mercy of allowing us to go through the performance of March 7. Nakalusot pa kami! (We squeaked through!). We did not realize that we would not meet again for an extended period of time. Ten days later, I was in a hospital isolation ward for fever and pneumonia. After five days, my pneumonia resolving nicely, my covid test negative, I was sent home. Alone in my house under mandatory quarantine from my family next door, I convalesced, concentrating on nothing in particular except feeling better. At a time that I felt quite helpless and useless, my Associate Conductor, Liya[1] messaged me asking permission to do a virtual choir project with the kids. Two young alumna, both in college, had come to her with the idea and she was interested in taking them up. I had marvelled at a virtual choir video released by a choir of medical volunteers just a day or two before and many emotions had stirred in me but I had no idea how it was done. So I gave Liya and Caitlin[2] permission to explore the matter and forgot about it. About two weeks later, as I was coming out of quarantine, Liya posted an announcement on the Cherubim Facebook Messenger thread with instructions on how to join the UP Cherubim and Seraphim virtual video recording of Stephen Schwartz’s “For Good” via Google drive. The drive contained a piano backing track and three voice guides, one for each of the singers to choose from and follow as they videotaped themselves on their little phone cameras. I left the young people alone, but I made a decision to open the invitation to the alumni I had contact with on other Messenger and Viber groups online, to join the project. The Google drive filled up rather sluggishly over the next few days. Then something happened. Two feverish days before the deadline, people started scrambling to turn in their videos. Over the internet, I coaxed and prodded, extended submission time by two hours, assured those who were frantically trying to get their videos in despite weak internet signals and service interruptions that we would wait. In the end, we received 75 submissions. Overwhelmed by the unexpected number of singers that had shown up on the Google drive, Liya and Caitlin’s computers started to break down and give way. I had to summon other “troops” from the older alumni, to augment our meager technical facilities and manpower. They took up the slack here as well – Lianne,[3] an architect with a bigger Google drive and organizing talent, Tara and Mik,[4] two medical alumni with audio-editing capabilities, and Jane,[5] a fine-arts graduate whose job included video editing. So, as we put it in Filipino, ginapang namin (literally, we crawled our way through). Slowly and painfully, in fits and starts, we learned how the process worked. On April 27, 2020, the final video was uploaded on Youtube. The reaction on the web was intense. By the end of the first week, we had over 11 thousand views.
Flush with our success and backed by the messages of congratulations from the people we had shared the video with and others we did not know browsing on the web, we became more (and perhaps almost wildly) ambitious. We planned out a whole virtual concert that promised to engage the enthusiasm of both our kids during what was to become a long period of quarantine, and bring to life the alumni that had scattered to the winds all over the globe. From May to September of 2020, in lieu of a regular concert, we would mount “Carillons a Musique,” a series of 10 videos featuring different combinations of current and alumni members, to “redeem the time” and bring us all together in celebration at a time of darkness and despair.
Lucio San Pedro and “Sa Ugoy ng Duyan”
July 9, 2020
By June of 2020, we had decided not to exhaust our singers’ energies and our own by dividing them into sectors that would be called on alternately to submit their videos so that we wouldn’t be working with such big groups. We released one more video, “You Will be Found” – a smaller, less complicated one involving only the 25 kids of the current group. Given our newfound resources and skills, we managed to put this together in a more assured, relaxed manner.
The next video would be the iconic “Sa Ugoy ng Duyan” by the National Artist, Lucio San Pedro who, in 1974, when he was known as Lolo Lucio to the older batches, had given Mom an arrangement of the work for “Tatlong Tinig.”[6] We had decided that only the alumni should sing in this work, to keep the number down to manageable levels. What we did not count on was that “For Good” had activated the long dormant Messenger and Viber networks that had been created years before for our 45th anniversary. Suddenly these threads were buzzing, people had been contacting each other, alumni had sought out long-lost members and had brought them into the group – from Abra, and Quezon City, from Singapore and Melbourne, from New York and San Francisco, London and Bonn. San Pedro’s classic ode to mothers everywhere awakened an old chord among the once-young singers and 88 of them responded with mature voices, rich memories and treasured photographs of their own mothers. They brought with them their stories. The experiences of having been away from their musical home for so long, of returning to singing after 40-odd years, of finding old friends and renewing relationships piled up on messenger and viber threads. One chorister felt she had to sing again, despite her misgivings about her voice, and send in a photo of her long-deceased mother, saying, “I wanted to do this for Mama.” Still another noted that he seems to have “recovered” his voice with the song and mused that perhaps, all the enforced rest from the stresses of office work during the lockdown might have had a hand in its return. Still others submitted videos of husbands and siblings and children who wanted to share in the excitement and joy.
Elated but somewhat daunted by the number of submissions, we turned the rich material over to our young technical group. Now the real struggle began. The virtual choral video is based on an old medium – human voices acting together to provide a rich and focused sound. But due to the pandemic, the choral medium has become a dangerous enterprise. Ordinary rehearsals and live concerts have suddenly become events that unleash the forces of contagion and contribute to the spread of the virus. The virtual video is a consolation that allows the devotee of the massed human voice to continue to harness its energy and latent power.
But this consolation is achieved at a considerable cost. The organizers must commit themselves to an arduous and technically difficult production process that requires a mastery of a variety of conceptual, aural and visual technologies and their corresponding techniques. Our core team, like so many other players, was quite gifted, but still for the most part, young people on the amateur or semi-professional level. I myself am technologically challenged and have only a vague idea of how to maneuver my way through the process. Some of the team are in the learning stage, others have done some simple work on DIY projects before or have drawn in friends that are more knowledgeable. Along the way, we also picked up some real professionals who actually know what they are doing. It is to the latter that we run when we find ourselves overstretched, but for the most part, we rely on our wits and newly discovered skills.
With “Sa Ugoy ng Duyan”, we were faced with numerous challenges. We had eighty-eight singers in various stages of life, many of whom had not sung in 3 or 4 decades, recording on different types of cell phones under daunting conditions – with dogs barking, cocks crowing, rain beating down on roofs and tricycle exhaust engines sounding in the background. We had instrumentalists waiting out appropriate moments to record their entries – e.g. the wee hours of the morning, when battling neighbors or sick relatives or babies were asleep. Some singers did not want their videos on the shared drive but agreed to submit on condition that these would be added at the last moment to the final mix because they didn’t want their old friends to hear what their voices sounded like today.
Our audio editor soldiered on, drinking her way through countless cups of coffee, trying to reconcile and bring together all the disparate material with the delicate rubato passages required in the work into a single, well integrated audio mix. But transferring the painstakingly constructed audio results to sync with the video side of the projects created unforeseen difficulties. Editing, it seems, takes raw amorphous material and reformulates part of it in shapes that may not correspond to other aspects of the original material. Once the audio mix had been adjusted to come together, the video pieces just could not be made to sync in smoothly. Individual videos clashed with the final audio mix. A number of people disappeared from important close-up sections upon inventory and these portions had to be painfully redone. This rattled us as a team. Stress took over members of the production team. Some withdrew into silence on the thread, others pushed and prodded to the point of nagging, fraying our capacities even more. We were getting on each other’s nerves. I decided to give everyone breathing space and time to figure things out individually, loosening deadlines, keeping quiet and adding more prayers to an already long list of intercessions to the Supreme Deity who is also the God of Sound.
A week past the deadline, a bit worn out from the collective effort and the attendant tension, we posted the final results on Facebook and uttered a collective sigh. The response to the posting was almost instantaneous and to my surprise, overwhelmingly positive. The sigh transformed itself into a gesture of relief. Our tense, guarded comments to each other as members of the staff became more relaxed. Comments by viewers on the net revealed a depth of emotion awakened that I did not expect. I could sense the stress melting away as the team assured themselves and each other that things were now ok.
I realized then that perhaps, in our zooming in as a team on the technical imperfections we could not solve, we had forgotten that God’s mighty gift of song has a power of its own. And that somehow, the collective energies, experiences and memories imbedded in the human bodies, minds and souls that had participated in the exercise would barrel themselves through the air carrying the fragile sound data, accumulated through many decades of human life, to convey this power past the weaknesses of the virtual medium into the real world.
In a discussion with another group of professional choristers, one of my colleagues had objected to the process. All that editing, all that adjusting, all that artificial control of the medium via technology, he posited, would create a sound that is, “just not us.” My “Ugoy ng Duyan,” experience on challenges this position. Every step of the way, our choristers were dogged by doubts, “I cannot figure out how to do this,” “I have never sung this piece before,” “I sound awful,” “My internet connection will not work,” “My kids are laughing at me and my efforts to record.” Our technical staff has been bogged down by differences in conceptualization, the inadequacies of their hard drives, the intransigiencies of the programs, the incompatibilities of the videos, problems with uploading, synchrony and their personal struggles with the media. But quarantined and isolated from each other in space, we have collectively come together, after 5 months or 5 decades of being separated, using the technology of our age to offer the fruits of the mighty gift of song that God has given to us and sharing it with others. What we see and hear on the computer screen may be processed and delivered through an alien medium, but the bodies and the faces and the voices and the sounds come from a source that is rich and deep and true. And so, as Maestro San Pedro would write at the end of each of his manuscripts, I say, “Deo Gratias!” for the gift, and wish it Godspeed as it winds its way through our 21st century ether.
Ryan Cayabyab and “Kay Ganda ng Ating Musika”
October 2, 2020
It has been almost 2 weeks since the release of “Kay Ganda ng Ating Musika,” the finale of our virtual concert and simultaneous launch of our webpage, filled with archival audio and videotapes and memories of alumni was premiered on Facebook and the web, respectively.[7] Participating in the video were Ryan Cayabyab, who was still a student, a young composer when he wrote both music and lyrics to a song that would capture the imagination of the nation and catapult him almost 50 years later to the status of National Artist. Mixing the sound and playing the drums was my brother, Robin Daniel Rivera, who was our student drummer when we first sang the song and who is now an almost legendary sound engineer and record producer with a PhD dissertation on the Philippine recording sound under his belt to boot. We tracked down our original bass player, the congenial Victor “Vikoy” Bautista, to the United States, where he emigrated decades ago, to join us in celebrating. Rounding off our team were two young members, Luisa Dioquino, our guitarist, who was in awe of her fellow instrumentalists but who stood up stoutly to the challenge, and Samric Mante, our video editor who ran rings around all the videos we threw his way. For one whole week, our alumni and current members’ timelines have been sizzling, with former and present members reporting their joy, their tears, their happy memories, for the fabric of the musical lives we have woven together. It has taken such an experience for me to fully realize that such a humble thing as a choir of little children could generate such light in a time of great darkness.
Tomorrow our church will celebrate Reformation Sunday. I open Facebook and discover, from one of the posts on “Desiring God” which regularly pops up on my feed, the statement by Michael Reeves:
What the Reformers saw, especially through the message of justification by faith alone, was the revelation of an exhuberantly happy God who glories in sharing his happiness.[8]
The words jump out of the page and strike me squarely in the heart and bring me back to the music we have collectively been making on line for the six months of quarantine. The experience of putting the final song together was also born amidst a time of great stress by a group of people who struggled to learn the complicated technical process of making music while physically separated from each other. Everyone was anxious about the very present danger confronting all of humanity, depressed in one way or another because of the disruption of the rhythms of contemporary everyday life, pressured by the demands to adjust to the abnormality of the times. And yet, here we were, all 150 of us, gathered in virtual space, filled with happiness, celebrating beauty, humanity, nature, music, life. Returning to Michael Reeves’ reflection on the reformation thinkers, he cites John Calvin, and notes that, “That is the secret of happiness and the secret of life.”[9] That, “according to the latter….‘it is necessary…for us to go out of ourselves to find happiness. The chief good of man is nothing else but union with God.’”[10]
Reeves points out that when he was pleased with his composition, Johann Sebastian Bach would write the letters S.D.G. (Soli Deo Gloria) at the end of the manuscript. Remembering Maestro San Pedro’s, “Deo Gratias!” at the end of his manuscripts, I realized that Calvin, Bach, San Pedro, and Cayabyab share this secret. And that through their music, they generously declare this news to us. For music has been a great source of happiness and fulfillment all throughout this period. It is a gift of grace handed down by a God full of love and joy, a channel of communication so that we can reach Him and thank Him for it, and an unparalleled opportunity for us to sing His praises.
Kay ganda nga ng ating musika! Purihin ang Panginoon!
*All songs in Carillons a Musique are available at upcherubim.org