As the early days of the pandemic pushed performances out of concert venues and onto our screens, the differences between live and livestream experiences became more apparent. These adaptations provoked questions for presenters and for performers: How can the magic of a live performance be captured online? How does a digital presentation change the ways in which artists perform and audiences experience the work? Will people return to concert halls?
We invited leaders of two music organizations to discuss how they’ve approached these questions and how the challenges of COVID-19 have shaped their artistic and organizational practices. In this expansive conversation, Miles Cohen, artistic director of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society (PCMS), and Donald Nally, conductor of The Crossing, talk about what isolation has meant for performers, returning to live performance, and how strengthened commitments to diversity, equity, inclusion, and access will shape future programming.
Both organizations are recent grant recipients of the Center. PCMS received a 2021 Re:imagining Recovery grant to upgrade performance space at the American Philosophical Society and expand their capacity to present livestreamed concerts online. With support from a 2020 Project grant, The Crossing is developing Farming, a new choral work staged outdoors among the crops of a Bucks County farm, to premiere in 2023.
What follows is a transcription of a conversation that took place on June 30, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.
Miles Cohen, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society Obviously it's been an incredible journey to the moment now. Did you have a summer season you kept active?
Donald Nally, The Crossing We did three concerts in summer 2021. They were all outside and used our Echoes equipment, which is this new speaker system that we developed to be able to sing distanced from each other. The first one was at Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve. It was a reprise of something that we had done in October 2020, the only other actual concert that we've done in the last 16 months. It sold out right away, and we really wanted to bring it back and have more opportunity for people to see it. The second one was at the Woodlands in West Philly, and the third one was at Awbury Arboretum in Germantown.
The first two concerts were designed to be completely socially distant: the audience, the singers, everything. And then at the last concert, the audience sat picnic-style, and we surrounded them in a 200-foot diameter with these amplifiers. I think we might try to go back to Awbury regularly because it was really just a great atmosphere, very informal, relaxed. We sang together synchronized for the first time.
Our last pre-pandemic performance was a very strange show, which I put together, and Kevin Vondrak, our assistant conductor, did all the musical arrangements. It was all Philip Glass and David Byrne’s Knee Plays, made into a completely different story. I think that closed on February 21, 2020, and we all went off thinking that we were going to Carnegie Hall in mid-March, and to Westminster Choir College, and to the Annenberg Center, and then none of that happened.
Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Dover Quartet with Davóne Tines, November 4, 2021, Perelman Theater, Kimmel Cultural Campus. Photo by Matt Genders.
Cohen Right, so at that point, just like us, you get to mid-March and your season through the summer is immediately shut down, and then as we get further into the spring, it's looking more like there'll be no summer. So, one of the things I was curious about coming from a standpoint of a choral vocal ensemble is: What were the discussions? How did you talk about it? For us, we had the opportunity to present non-vocal music, which changes things because there are masks, and if you're in a chamber ensemble with smaller groups or even soloists, you can still pull that off. But if you're in a vocal ensemble, that is probably at the back end of what COVID would permit. So, what was the thinking in terms of what to do with your ensemble and how to get back to something like you did in October?
Nally We embraced the fact that we couldn't sing together and that's just the way it is. And I also knew that I have zero interest in the Zoom choir, or all of that recording at home on a click and sending it in and then everybody's little squares are there. That's just not interesting to me. I do realize that many choirs did that successfully, and they held their communities together through that. There's a lot of pride I think in those projects. For me, that just made my heart bleed. I can't tell you how many of those I started receiving by the end of March, right?
Cohen Quite a lot.
Nally I would just look at them and feel like, "Oh my God, this just increases the isolation for me." I decided that we were going to focus on isolation and make projects about what it felt like to be a part of all of this and particularly to be a singer, because their lives fell apart completely one day. March 13, 2020, their lives stopped. We were really intent on trying to provide art and work for them. That took a number of hands, some taking existing material and making animated films out of them to send some money to singers.
We eventually wound up developing this series called Rising w/ The Crossing that we started sending every morning at sunrise on March 16. Those were all live performances from the past. We insisted that everything be live so that it had that feeling of immediacy and wasn't perfect. We did twelve straight weeks, Monday through Friday at sunrise, then we took a break for a month and then came back and did every Monday morning for another three months. That was a way of connecting and keeping everybody engaged, and then launching special projects like a CD release here and there or a new film release here and there.
In June 2020, I was exhausted and I wasn't conducting, and I got really, really down. So I just started talking to our team, and we came up with this idea of developing these speakers where we could sing together, and then we realized that we actually could be synchronized because we could send them a guide track out into the field. We started making live films of them in this huge field that I was staying on, at a friend’s farm.
Cohen How did you come up with the design for the speakers?
Nally My idea was: If we can't sing together, then who sings for us, right? What does that mean? You can amplify shit, and it just gets louder, right? That's not interesting to me. I wanted to make it more intimate. So, how could we do something where singers were singing at their absolutely softest and most intimate, and yet have an audience member be able to understand exactly what they're saying? And the answer, of course, is to have a singer 25 feet away and a speaker right in the audience member’s face. Kevin [Vondrak] and I developed this piece called The Forest, which we wrote for this sound system. And then our sound person Paul Vazquez and Kevin and I developed what the speaker would look like. Paul knows all this stuff: which speaker we would use, adding a looper to it, adding a mixer to it to boost the sound. The looper allows every singer to sing with themselves and make harmony with themselves over and over again. Each singer could be a twelve-voice choir if we wanted. Multiply that by 24 and you have hundreds of voices in a piece if you want.
The Crossing, June 2021, Awbury Arboretum. Photo by John C. Hawthorne.
The Crossing, The Forest, 2020.
Cohen You were able to set that up in your field, right where you were stuck?
Nally We did. And then we eventually took it out to Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve and made this piece in the forest. The whole metaphor of the singer, like a tree's relationship to the forest—they actually rely completely on the other trees and vice versa. A singer is that same thing, an individual artist, but they rely on and acquire all of those other elements and people. The libretto to The Forest was written by the singers about their experiences. That is one of several ways we responded to getting art and money to singers. I was very fortunate that there is a friend of The Crossing who was eager to support whatever we were going to come up with. Unfortunately, he passed away then at the end of October from COVID. One of his last projects that he did with us was to support—at a really substantial amount—all of this, plus our diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and company-wide exploration, and eventually commissioning a few pieces that were related to that topic.
Cohen I think we had the same kind of response. We sat down in March and said to ourselves, “How are we going to put our musicians back on the stage? How are we going to create something that engages our artists and connects with our audience?" The difference between our organizations is that you have this treasure trove of live recordings that you had made, so you could immediately dip into that and create the Rising w/ The Crossing series, which was fantastic. PCMS had done nothing like that. We had zero archival materials, other than some world premieres that we had recorded. We were so innocent in terms of what it meant to livestream or put your performances on multimedia. We had to go back and learn everything. And like you, we were fortunate to have some patrons step up and support that in a way that was very meaningful to us, purchasing video, audio, and lighting equipment. But to us, for the most part, we had really just thought about, We put musicians on stage and magic happens. Now you had to think about angles and cameras and where you’re going to place the mic, where the lighting is going to go, what kind of environment and ambience that you're creating, and whether you can do that in a hall like Benjamin Franklin Hall at the American Philosophical Society, which is really just predominantly a lecture space.
I gauged from our musicians that performing to no one, to cameras, was a very different experience for them. There was no collaboration between artist and audience anymore. For us, because we were going to be in a hall, I said, "We have to figure out a way to see if we can get a small audience into the hall. Even if it's only 25 people, it will immediately change how a musician performs, because there's somebody to perform to in the hall." For us, it wasn't just about getting livestreaming up and rolling. I felt like everybody was doing that. I wanted to figure out how we could put an audience in the hall. And that of course was complicated for a number of reasons. Would your artists agree? Would your board of directors agree? Would your patrons agree? Would your staff agree? And how could you do this all without getting sued?
We went through that process and kept our fingers crossed a little bit, but what we found out in creating and finding out step-by-step who was willing to do it was that the musicians were willing and eager to do anything. They just wanted to get back out there. I can only imagine that when you did get back and you actually met your musicians again, it must have been an incredibly emotional experience.
Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Belcea Quartet, October 22, 2021, Perelman Theater, Kimmel Cultural Campus. Photo by Matt Genders.
Nally It was, but it's funny that you should say that about their willingness, because our singers are incredibly flexible and really generous. However, these Echoes amplification kits, they were designed back when we were still not leaving our houses, so they were designed to allow every single singer to carry their entire kit by themselves into the woods and set it up by themselves and have no interaction with other human beings. It turned out that was probably a little overkill. But here are these singers with the backpack, and a woofer, and another pack with the four segments that go on top of it, and these boards that go on the ground, and never a peep of complaint.
There's one other thing that you mentioned—and it is in my whole philosophy about performance—that you're doing what you're doing in the process, and then you open the doors and let your friends in and say, "This is where we are and we hope you like where we are." But I try to not treat a performance as any kind of an elevated thing. However, you brought up this really good point: Without the audience it is still kind of just practicing, and everybody who's doing it knows it. When you're making a recording, for time management, money management, all that stuff, you're really trying to get it right, but you know that most of the time that's a practice because you're going to go back and do it again. You're so right in that it just changes everything about the way in which a musician on the stage—and I think a person at home—reacts and interacts. So, I stopped watching livestreams after by the middle of May 2020. I was just like, "I'm sorry, I'm out, I just can't."
When did you start back with audiences?
Cohen We started in October 2020, and we did it until November, when the city shut down, and then we spent six weeks, maybe eight weeks, without audiences. We went back to livestreaming, and immediately there was a difference in the artists’ experience, the fact that if we screwed something up, we'd go back and redo it. In January, the city allowed people to congregate again, and we came back. Through that period of time, we had gone out, we had shopped, I'd been outside. I wasn't totally bunkered down after May. I couldn't deal with it anymore. I was experiencing life masked in situations much more crowded than 30 people in a hall that holds 400. So, this was the safest environment we could possibly fathom to create. I felt that our audience, which was extremely mask-conscious and wanting to be responsible, were all into this the entire time. I never felt at any moment that we were taking a chance. We created a 30-foot gap between the stage and the audience. We gave them the option to wear a mask or not. But we didn't actually engage a singer or do anything vocal until January. We had wind players, and the audience seemed okay with it all. I think people wanted to go out, as much as they were anxious.
I think that the art that we consume in person, it was just impossible to keep recreating that experience, as much as we tried. Computers ultimately failed us in that way. That being said, people liked having access to the music. They loved the fact that if they didn't watch it the moment it happened, they had a window of 72 hours to watch. But the fact that somebody would then say to me, "Well, I watched it while I was eating breakfast." I was always like, "Well, okay." All of a sudden, our performances became something very different than what we envisioned.
I think that we all wrestled with what to do with livestream, as we've gone through the pandemic and as we go forward. What does livestream mean to our organization? For us, livestream is just going to be a component of what we do, it's not going to be the focus, because the goal for us is to get our audience back into the hall and to recreate the magic that we had pre-COVID. But, we would like to be able to cultivate audiences outside of our immediate area. We wound up with people tuning in from states and countries far and wide, much to my surprise. But I still think that the goal for you, for me, for all the artistic directors of organizations is how to recreate the magic that we had, that we worked so hard at. Is that how you're feeling about livestream going forward?
Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, recording of violinist Joseph Lin, originally streamed live April 9, 2021.
Nally Yes. We didn't do any livestreaming during the pandemic. Everything was prerecorded. We've only dabbled in livestreaming prior to that. It's really hard to capture what's going on in the room, right? There are blend issues of how the room is interacting with the sound, which you're not going to get online, and there is experiencing the landscape of a choir. This is why we always supertitle everything, because we don't want people staring at their laps or at their texts. We want them looking toward the choir using the architecture of the building that they're in. It's why we usually project them onto the building itself, because we don't want to put a screen up. But the whole thing is about this back-and-forth between the people in the choir, and you can't really do that with cameras. I happen to love film, and it's been really fun to work in it a little bit, but livestream is not a big deal for us.
One of the things I think is really important is that we remember what we went through. And I don't mean we just remember, "Oh, we all got locked at home for a year." I mean that, but I also mean what happened with our government, that complete abject failure of the government and the constant lying, the uprising, which I think did awaken a lot of people to issues they were not aware that they were complicit in. Good people trying to do good things and just simply not hearing what was being said.
We should not just go back and be like, "Oh my God we lived." At the end of that movie where the plane crashes on the side of the mountain, everybody is walking across the river and yelling, "We made it! We made it!" I don't want that. Yes, I am incredibly grateful that I and most of my friends and colleagues did make it, but I don't want to forget this. So, Echoes will be a part of remembering in the future, commissioning works for outside, for distance, for the continued focus on what it is like to be isolated, because there are so many people that are isolated every day, right?
The Crossing, Stateless, 2020.
Cohen Yep. I think the isolation is really at the heart of what you're referring to, the extreme version we all went through that splintered into all these different outcomes from the personal to the societal to the global. And I think it's going to be inherent for all the leaders of local arts organizations, especially in a city like Philadelphia, to dig deeper, to lean into a lot of the things that we had not necessarily acknowledged on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Believe it or not, I think it's not as hard as everyone would say it is. There is such great talent. There are such great resources out there to tap into, musically and artistically.
For you and for me, when it comes to planning the future of our organizations, I feel incredibly blessed to be able to see a multitude of Black artists, Black ensembles, Black choreographers, Latin choreographers, Latin poets, and on and on in the minorities of the United States and elsewhere in the world, and I feel a renewed focus onto and into not just this season but for the extended future. I wish that it didn't have to come to a boiling point like we all experienced in summer of 2020, but regardless of what did occur, the important thing for me—sitting in the meetings and Zoom conferences and DEI sessions that you and I did in our own organizations—is to think about how we learn from what has happened and how we go forward with it.
The future is a very bright one for us in that sense. I think that we will take the necessary steps to really highlight a group of people that have been overlooked, and that doesn't always just mean minorities. The gender imbalance in some of the things that I have in my world, especially in the chamber music world, is pretty glaring at times. That's something else that we can address much more so. I think we were taking steps before last March, and I think what occurred really refocused all of us. Now we take our next steps collectively, as in the performing arts world together.
Nally The revelation for me was in these discussions early on, talking about who we are in relationship to the engagement or participation of people in the Crossing community who don't look like me. I find myself often saying, “There are so many composers that I’m really, really interested in, but they don't have choral repertoire in their work list.” New York Philharmonic is not the place to write your first large orchestral work, right? I'm not putting us in the same category, but I am saying that it's a pretty advanced ensemble. And then I just had this revelation in one of those conversations where I just went, "Hold on, if I'm in The Crossing, if we're the leading and most prolific commissioner of new choral work in the United States, if not beyond, then the only people that you have to point a finger at about people not having experience and works on their work list is me.” That just seems incredibly obvious, and it was not obvious. It was not clear to me at all. So we—really joyfully—completely rethought how we look at who we're going to be commissioning and making works with, and of course then that opens us up to a much, much larger array of styles and personal and historical backgrounds, and that just makes us all smarter. It was a rough couple of weeks when I had to walk around just saying that sentence to myself over and over and over and saying, "How could I have missed that?" But here we are.
Cohen I've thought for a long time that a failure of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society is to be presenting an art form to a city that is now predominantly Black and to have such little diversity in the artists that we present, the staff that we have, and the board and audience that we have. I think the area that can be immediately addressed is the product you put on the stage, your artists, your commissions.
I think what I didn't know, what I felt very naive about to be perfectly honest, was listening to well-known Black and Latin artists talk about the daily racism that they experience in their professional lives. I was blown away that this is something that is ever present in almost every aspect of their performance careers, no matter what level they've achieved. I was so disheartened and shaken by that in hearing these stories that it made me rethink what we are doing as an organization to not fall into those same scenarios that these artists are experiencing. Are we doing enough to cultivate an atmosphere when our artists come that they'd feel welcome and they are not going through these similar kinds of racism? You can't sing these roles, you can't perform this repertoire, you can't perform on this night, you have to perform with these groups of people. It was all an amazing awakening to me in that sense and in the sense that for you and me and the white population, that we come to a reckoning that we are often in environments that are very comfortable for us. And our Black and Latin artists are often in environments that are not very comfortable for them, even if we are trying to make it comfortable.
I think I also had weeks and months where I walked around actually shaking my head at the naivete that I brought into my own daily work environment about how things were unfolding and hopefully learning from that and growing from that, which is clearly where we all want to go with our lives and our organizations as we go forward.
The Crossing, shoot for outdoor film, 2020. Photo by John C. Hawthorne.
Nally The Center asked us about being optimistic, which doesn't come naturally to me, but we could talk about it.
Cohen If we can distill it down to our organizations, I will say that, I feel a tremendous sense of hope for the reasons that you and I have spoken about: putting musicians back on a stage together again in front of larger audiences, bringing audiences back in, having a challenge now of how we go forward with diversifying our audience, diversifying our artists, commissioning, following Donald Nally and The Crossing, and how to find the most creative and brilliant minds out there to commission no matter where they're coming from, to be openminded in the best possible sense. I feel that hope. I am anxious about whether what was our core audience will return to our concerts in the near future, but then I think to myself, well, maybe if they don't come back, maybe we'll actually cultivate a newer audience, an audience that will spring from the ashes of what was the worst 15 months. As much as I'm like you and I tend to be a worrier, I want to believe that there is some optimism and hope there and I think you might share that.
Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, recording of violists Hsin-Yun Huang and Misha Amory and pianist Thomas Sauer, originally streamed live January 7, 2021.
Nally One of the questions earlier that we have sort of talked about is what we've learned, and one thing is that image of that survivor coming off the mountain. That's kind of our staff. That team of people banded together with such a singular sense of purpose and commitment. We're all exhausted because we've worked harder than we've ever worked in our lives—and that's really saying something, because these are hard workers. That's very inspiring to me, the willingness and flexibility of singers just to try it, just to try anything, right? But it leads to something that's really interesting, because I've spent a whole part of my life just constantly asking this question, “What is a choral concert? How do you present it?” Is it like The Crossing Christmas at Holy Trinity, or is it a staged work over at Icebox Project Space, or is it both of those things, or neither? Is it outside, in the forest?
At the end of the day, what the singer is going to do, what the staff wants us to do, what I want to do, and what the audience wants us to do, is to get together and sing concerted music, music that requires us to do what we actually hope that we're already doing every day, which is listen to each other, which is listening intently and to listen with a sense of comprehension, not response. That really is what choral music is. A choir is not made up of great voices. It's made up of great people. It doesn't matter whether it's at some odd space or in the front of the church or whatever. What matters to all of us is singing together and listening, and that makes me very optimistic.
Cohen The pandemic really crystallized what we already knew, which is that we don't have to do something only one way. We can do it many, many ways. And now that we're coming out of it, let's continue to think outside of the boxes and the walls of what a concert hall is. Let's explore what it means to perform in a variety of different settings. Your Echoes device and all the things that you've done outside are only inspiration to all of us, and I hope that we'll all take cues from that. A lot of orchestras and opera companies had to think differently and experiment with different ways to get their art form out there. Just because we can go back to the way it was doesn't mean we need to do that necessarily all the time.
The Crossing, 2021, Story Mill, Bozeman, Montana. Photo by Blair Speed.
