Clarissa let me know about the Seattle Zoom singing, and for once I didn’t have an evening meeting for my job, so I decided to attend.
I was somewhat doubtful about the Zoom singings that people have been doing: get on a Zoom call, share a recording of a Sacred Harp tune, and sing along while you and everyone else is muted — where’s the fun in that? But it really was a lot of fun. First of all, you get to see people that you’ve met at past singings. Then too you get to see singers that you’ve never met before. And it was surprisingly satisfying singing along with a recording.
I was interested in how this singing was organized. Clarissa was the host, and she asked people to put their song choices in chat. Then Gillian found videos of the tunes that people chose, and sent those links to the person who did the screen sharing. I wound up doing the screen sharing of the videos for the first half of the singing, then Erik took over. Clarissa, Gillian, and Erik made it look easy. I liked the fact that Clarissa asked people to say a little something about whatever song they chose, and it was nice to hear what people had to say.
At the end, Clarissa said that there were singers from 10 different states logged in to the Zoom call.