From splendid to surreal: reflections of a weekend at an online national singing conference

From last Friday evening until late Sunday afternoon, I was online on my laptop, attending the 2020 ANATS National Conference. This conference of Australian singing teachers was originally planned for Adelaide, but after Covid-19 rendered a face to face conference out of the question, the planning shifted to a virtual conference. I was part of the organising committee and therefore experienced the weekend both as a delegate and organiser.

Conferences are certainly not new to me; over my 30+ years of singing teaching I have attended many, both nationally and internationally. I have assisted in the planning and running of several. But this was my first fully online conference.

It was refreshingly relaxing not to have to pack a suitcase and race to the airport after teaching classes up to the last moment. But I missed the flying and the opportunity those few hours in the air give to separate oneself from work at home and into conference mode. For the same reason, I missed the whole hotel experience – the catchups with colleagues over breakfast, late night drinks in the bar while going over the next day’s schedule and so on.

We did have a welcome reception on Friday evening. When planning for a conference in Adelaide, the Beatles famous appearance there in the 1960s, provided a theme. One venue which was considered in the early stages of planning was the Adelaide Town Hall, on the balcony of which the Beatles famously appeared on June 1964, to the largest crowd of fans of their Australian tour. Thus, the conference title “Come Together” was born and even when the conference planning moved towards an online format, the title and theme remained. 

At the welcome reception, delegates changed their computer screen backgrounds to Beatles themes, dressed in Beatles and / or 1960s inspired costumes and poured their own drinks at home. The inimitable Pat Wilson wrote and performed (with a little help from music theatre students at Elder Conservatorium) a song welcoming us all to the conference and showing us what we were missing in Adelaide. Delegates turned off their mics and sang along to “Come Together”. Random break-out rooms were created twice during the reception so that delegates could chat in small groups. This was a very popular activity. Vocalocity – Amelia Nell’s singing ensemble from the Blue Mountains, sang for us and provided a link between the previous conference and this one. Another link was provided by a video of the song composed by Di Hughes for, and recorded at, the previous conference in 2018.

An important aspect of any conference is the networking that happens during meal breaks and various social activities. The Beatles theme provided some opportunity to engage in asocial way despite being online; for example there was a photo competition for the best photo referencing to a Beatles song. Delegates were very creative with their photo submissions.

The conference took place over a conference app – Whova – with Zoom used for larger sessions. Delegates engaged easily with the app and were able to send messages to presenters and other delegates during sessions and throughout the conference. Similarly, the Chat function on Zoom was used both for personal messages and professional questions. Most of the keynotes were delivered live but papers and other presentations tended to be pre-recorded.

The 3 keynote speakers came from the USA, UK and Australia and during their sessions I felt a strong sense of being at the conference. But at the morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea breaks, it felt surreal to duck out and into my own kitchen to boil the kettle. I missed the chat with conference friends and colleagues. 

On the Saturday afternoon (we were 2 hours behind in WA) delegates from WA gathered at a bar in South Perth for a conference get-together. That was fun and a chance to chat with colleagues. Interestingly, many had not yet watched any of the conference. With the conference app, all sessions will be available for one month after the conference. The upside of that is that, unlike face to face conferences when one has to choose between concurrent sessions, with this one, all sessions can be watched eventually. 

Overnight on Saturday, some Australian states moved into daylight saving time. That meant that in my state of WA the Sunday 9.30am session started at 6.30am. Differing time zones is certainly an issue to be considered in virtual conferences.

This conference attracted around 300 delegates which is big for an ANATS conference. We had delegates from New Zealand and the USA – again unusual. Management of large groups online can be challenging; for example in the special interest group which I chaired, there were 4 screens of participants and I found it quite stressful to constantly scroll across screens to spot delegates with hands raised to speak, while at the same time focussing on the discussion.

In a post - Covid world there is likely to be an appetite for more online conferences – or at least  an online option or component in future conferences. Just as teachers have upskilled in online teaching this year, I am sure we will all become better at engaging in the virtual conference world.

Music Monday - Resilience in music teachers during Covid.

I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be an effective and resilient Australian music teacher in 2020.

The ground has shifted multiple times this year and each shift has found music teachers seeking new ways to find balance and stay effective in the job.

First there was the lockdown- which of course is still in place in parts of Australia. In the early pandemic lockdown days teachers learned to adapt and implement online learning over a variety of platforms. Those of us engaged in teaching singing quickly found the frustrations of the lag on every online platform. We started to prepare and issue backing tracks so that our students could experience accompaniments in real time when singing for us. Ideas and tips were shared.

Zoom fatigue became a thing- after a day of online teaching in front of a laptop screen our necks were locked and our brains exhausted. But then we would turn to watching videoed self-tapes submitted by students for our critical response.

When some states returned to face-to-face teaching we felt relieved. But then a new reality kicked in. Teaching rooms needed to be sanitized between students. Piano keyboards were sanitized between players. Social distancing rendered some of our teaching spaces unusable. Points of assessment missed in first semester were scheduled into a much tighter time frame. At the secondary performing arts school I work in, we scheduled two senior school musicals in the space of two weeks with a fifty percent capacity audience in keeping with the level of restrictions still in place in WA.

Our final year secondary students who are applying for places in tertiary music performance courses find the rules changed here too of course. Instead of live auditions in November - after final academic exams will be over- most tertiary institutions are requiring self- taped videos to be submitted from the end of August. This has significantly reduced the preparation time.

And of course, running underneath these shifting rules is the consideration of ‘what if?’ What if there is another wave (as there has been in Victoria) and we are locked down again? Will 2021 be the year in which most students in elite performance courses - like NIDA, WAAPA, VCA to name only three- are sourced from their home state rather than interstate and overseas? So many ‘what ifs’.

In the meantime teachers are dealing with understandably stressed students.

There has not been one week this year when I have not had at least one student at the secondary or tertiary level in a state of stress which has significantly compromised their work. I get it- none of us knows what the way out of this pandemic really looks like. None of us were around in 1918 for the last one.

But as teachers we are the guides, the strong ones, right?

But who looks after us? And if we are responsible for that, how do we do it?

Among my colleagues I have observed several approaches. One friend took a term of leave and has returned to school refreshed. Several friends are drinking more alcohol in the evenings than in non- Covid times. Yet another colleague has abstained from alcohol altogether and looks and feels fantastic. I have started knitting- nothing complicated, just long scarves with uncomplicated stitches. I find it curiously calming and meditative.

As I write this I am reminded of a radio interview on mindfulness and resilience which I heard in my car early on in the pandemic. A three point approach was encouraged:

1. Each evening think of one thing which went well in your day.

2. Each day make contact with someone in your address book- by phone, by text message, by an act of kindness or a social media post.

3. Spend 10 minutes a day being mindful- eg walk around your block focussing just on the sounds in your immediate environment.

What are you doing to stay healthy and strong in these challenging teaching times?

As always, we encourage and welcome your comments.

Music Monday - Embodied Singing

This is the final week of what has been a long and challenging semester in high schools across Australia and the whole world. In my own little world of a performing arts high school in Perth, I have a tradition in the final week of allowing the younger music theatre specialist students to sing an ‘own choice song’ of any genre, purely for the fun of singing -  the only provision being that the text is suitable for a school environment. I work at the school on Mondays and Fridays so today was the first of these ‘own choice song’ days for this year.

Predictably, today the year 10 girls chose music theatre songs from current favourite shows – think Wicked, Frozen, Beetle Juice, Bring It On.  And the year 8 boys, after asking, “Miss, is it okay to do a rap song if we don’t sing the rude words?”, sang lustily, with a nudge and wink at each other at all the (silent) offensive moments. 

What was clear in all the fun song performances today was that every student was relaxed. There was no sense of assessment or preparing a song that would at some point become an assessment task. Their bodies were relaxed and when they inhaled it was with relaxed abdominal muscles. There was a bit of bopping around to the backing tracks and a much greater unconscious grounding of their lower bodies. These are all qualities that as a singing teacher, I strive for every day. All the singing today was embodied.

Greater embodiment is something we often observe in a masterclass when a singer, after instruction from the master teacher, sings very much better on the second attempt. This can be due to valuable help from the master teacher -  but can also be in part, a more relaxed performance after settling into a performance situation.

At my other workplace – a music theatre department at tertiary level – we have a series of ‘audition performance practices’. Lately these have of course been online, but when we are all in the space together, students so often fare much better in the singing task set at the ‘call back’ than in their actual performance. It seems that getting an endorsement of their initial performance in the form of a call-back allows them to relax into their bodies for the ‘call back’.

What does this all mean for us as teachers of singing? 

I think we need to take every opportunity to learn from the expertise of psychologists working in the field of performance. And we need to constantly search for the warm-up strategies which help students unlock their own bodies. In performance, we need to encourage students to embrace the character and story and lose themselves and their complete focus on technique.

As always, I invite and thank you for your comments.