Remotely successful? - classical music-making during lockdown.

This is an old article dating from early 2021, probably sometime in February. I initially intended to submit it to a musical journalism scheme being run by Radio 3 (the BBC's classical radio station). I missed the deadline but completed it anyway in the next day or two for my own satisfaction.

Performances of any sort have been challenging to organise during the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with other performers, classical musicians have had their ability to perform live severely curtailed. During the pandemic, dependent on individual circumstances and the current coronavirus regulations, it has often been illegal to gather and make music as normal. And even where music-making might strictly be legal, it might well still be inadvisable. So with Lockdown Number 3 still ongoing, how have classical musicians, both amateur and professional, been managing? And how might they manage in the future?

One approach has been to produce "almost-live" experiences, where musicians perform together in person (with any necessary Covid-19 precautions) and broadcast the result to an audience that can't be in the same place to listen. This helps to capture the experience of hearing musicians perform live together, although in practice this is not often actually streamed directly for technical and administrative reasons. This risks disappointment because ultimately it's "just" a recording, so the performers need to work out what makes it special or even simply worthwhile. Some possible answers include: stage design and camerawork to match the music; other content presented inline between pieces of music, such as commentary, poetry or documentary; or programming that relates to the specific circumstances, for instance commissioning work from a living composer, or simply maintaining regular traditions, such as the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Day concert or The Halle's Christmas concert.

Whether because of safety considerations, or flat-out legal prohibition, at times it has not been possible for any gathering of musicians to happen in person. Hence the next step is to separate the musicians physically while connecting them via the Internet. But this introduces its own problems.

The fundamental barrier musicians face is that connecting across the internet introduces a time lag, or "latency". Videoconferencing tools like Teams or Zoom are designed to cope with conversational speech, where the participants take turns speaking. A time lag of between a quarter and a half of a second is common, which is easy enough to cope with, even though it does takes a bit of adjustment to avoid speaking over one another. Try and sing or play music together at the same time, however, and the time lag makes it impossible. How many groups of friends during 2020 must have tried and failed horribly to sing Happy Birthday together, remotely?

Many groups have kept their spark alive during the pandemic by using tools like Zoom for online rehearsals. The positives are reasonably obvious: the members of the group, whether it be a choir, orchestra or anything else, get to stay in practice (singing and playing involve muscle memory and fitness just like any sport). The sense of occasion is mentally motivating for many musicians, and a regular online rehearsal can help members and friends keep in touch and still feel a sense of belonging. But there is one huge drawback using the available videoconferencing tools - the time lag means that in practice all except one participant in the call must be muted, otherwise chaos ensues. The experience is almost like a glorified karaoke - each individual musician sings or plays along to a "guide" (which could be live accompaniment or pre-recorded) and no one can hear their fellow musicians. Everyone is stuck hearing their own mistakes, with no ability to simply follow along with others if you're not feeling too confident. For some amateur musicians, this is disheartening enough to be a deal-breaker. For others, if you're basically able to sing or play the right notes already, there's often not much improvement to be made without any immediate feedback on your own singing.

Virtual collaborations are one way of embracing the limitations of the internet and working with them. It's an idea that's at least 10 years old in classical music, given that Eric Whitacre's first Virtual Choir project was completed way back in 2010. The idea is simple - ask physically distant performers to record their own individual part for a piece of music, then edit all the parts together to make a combined recorded performance.

The downsides are certainly numerous: for one, just like the online rehearsals, performers don't get to hear each other and so they miss out on the satisfaction of blending together live. There are significant technical barriers to entry too. Each individual performer typically needs access to at least two suitable devices, one for recording and one for playing a backing track into headphones. Plus there are extra skills barriers to entry which many people might lack, for instance, being able to sing along accurately to a guide track playing through headphones. The production of the finished recording involves plenty of work for a small number of people, or perhaps just one person. With all the admin involved, a backing track to produce, and intensive effort needed for audio and video editing, a virtual collaboration is no small undertaking.

That said, the results can be superb, and not purely because of the good quality audio or video that's achievable in the finished piece. A virtual collaboration can provide a sense of purpose for a group; a feeling of achievement on completion; the ability for performers to enjoy the finished product; and there's also excellent engagement potential via social media - all of which can help compensate a little for the lack of live events.

Photo: screen grab from a Hallé Choir virtual collaboration

One final approach that remains is to try and battle the internet lag head-on. With a single-minded technical focus on minimising any delay in communication, it's possible to reduce lags of hundreds of milliseconds (ms) down to less than 30ms, a level below which experienced musicians can work with. This requires specific software such as JackTrip, JamKazam or Jamulus, and for really good results, dedicated audio hardware too. None of these apps appear to be designed primariliy with classical musicians in mind, but it seems that small groups of classical musicians could reasonably play chamber music together.

For many of us though, the ideal classical music experience would be to hear a large ensemble perform live to a high standard, and this is where the outlook starts to get gloomier. For this to be possible remotely, the software and hardware has to provide low-latency audio across hundreds of channels (a large-scale performance could easily have a 60-person orchestra plus a 150-strong chorus). Each of those channels would need sound-checking and balancing carefully. The conductor would face unprecedented challenges trying to get so many musicians to play exactly in time while dealing with the latency - the lag may be tolerably small for many purposes but difficulties becoming obvious when performing music that contains very fast passages or that requires great flexibility in tempo. Many classical musicians will have experience of dealing with similar issues resulting from huge echoing acoustic spaces or from being physically distanced within the performance space. But to deal with that on top of the physical isolation and the technical challenges currently seems like an unachievable goal. Sadly this means that right now, a remote large-scale live performance is unattainable remotely, and the world of classical music needs to continue to occupy its various online niches while we wait for vaccines to take effect and venues to re-open.