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Community Round Table: The Effect of Covid on Music Education
The moderator of our first roundtable discussion group sums it up as succinctly as one could hope: “Covid Vs. Music”. While Covid had a heavy impact on the education system as a whole, attempting to teach music in an era when singing or playing instruments in groups was prohibited added an extra layer of complexity.
Moderator Don Walmsley talks to three local music educators about their experiences over the past two years: Angie Weisgerber, elementary school music teacher and private piano teacher; Carolyn Durston, private voice and piano teacher and community choral conductor; and Blair Chapman; high school music teacher and professional musician.
Weisgerber recounts having to leave her music room behind and put everything she needed for music lessons on a cart that travelled from classroom to classroom, as students were restricted to one classroom and prevented from unnecessary movement around the school. The only instruments they played were percussion instruments, which Weisgerber says they did become very proficient at, but it can’t replace the singing voice. When she did return to teaching in the music room, she had to use a microphone and bluetooth speaker to be heard by students in that space.
But she also counts herself and her students lucky that the Beautiful Plains School Division made an effort to find ways to continue music education at all; many of her peers in other divisions were pulled from their programs and put on regular classroom teaching for the duration of the pandemic.
Chapman talks about how any vocal music at the high school, when it was allowed at all, had to be done outdoors on the football field with students spaced six feet apart and masked. Under those conditions, it was all but impossible for students to hear one another - an essential part of choral music. The school musical was also cancelled, which is a highlight of the year for many students. It will not be making a comeback until 2023.
Chapman’s son is currently studying and performing music at the university level, and he calls the effect of Covid on their education “traumatic”.
Durston added that it wasn’t just the changes that affected students but the constant interruptions. Because a priority wasn’t placed on music as part of education, classes and lessons were constantly halted entirely as restrictions changed and then resumed again as they were lifted. She estimates she was able to teach about half of the normal number of lessons in a year, and even those were not consecutive but broken up into groups, which had a measurable effect on student progress.
Another element that was missing was performance. Performance, especially for students and amateurs, isn’t just an interaction between performer and audience - although it is certainly that too - but a goal that promotes learning and excellence. It builds confidence and, in the case of the competitive Fine Arts Festival which has not run for three years now, it provides critical feedback from music professionals outside of their teachers. All three of our panelists share how the lack of performance has affected their students of all ages, from kindergarten to church choirs.
“I’ve seen it all…until Covid,” says Durston of her career in music since 1977. “There was so much activity in this community and it came to a crashing halt.” Music as a shared experience permeated much of the discussion. For instance the town’s annual Christmas Concert, which normally brings about a dozen choirs together in one performance space, was this past year changed to have each choir or performance group record themselves individually and the results edited together into a concert. Even that, however, was celebrated as it at least gave groups the chance to perform.
There is such significant lead time needed to mount a performance or musical theatre production that, even when restrictions were lifted for certain periods of time, it was often too late to plan, produce, and perform any productions. Preemptive cancellations of annual projects were the norm.
"If we've learned anything over the past two years," says Chapman, "watching things on a screen is just not the same."
So where do we go from here? Durston says that things have been returning slowly, and maybe that’s the best way to do it. Programs will need to evolve to meet the needs of the world they’re coming back to, and new strategies to get people to return to these activities, or to join them for the first time, may also be needed. But the desire is clearly there, and for music students, there’s a lot to catch up on.
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