By Sydney Renfro and Emily Wegrzynowicz
The American University music department does not yet have a solidified plan for in-person musical ensembles this fall, according to Joshua Bayer, director of AU’s instrumental jazz ensembles and teacher in the music department.
At the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, Bayer said he “wasn’t entirely comfortable with the situation and had to work through a bunch of things,” including rehearsing through Zoom.
For him, it took some time to develop an efficient plan for online classes. Around springtime, Bayer said he found himself teaching a lot more. “We put in about 10 times the work, but the product was extraordinary,” he said.
Currently, Bayer is developing ideas for in-person ensembles, but a lack of detail in the administration’s covid plans, particularly with guidance for music programs, has made it challenging. “We haven’t heard anything about mask issues, which would make ensembles difficult,” Bayer said.
He had multiple ideas on how to rehearse in-person, such as rehearsing in the Katzen Art Center courtyard, but he has not heard back on whether he can actually proceed with the idea. “That is a different set of rules they can tell me about,” he said.
He also wants to try having two concerts at 50% capacity for any students who want to have the opportunity to perform in person, but he hasn’t yet proposed the idea to the administration. Currently, AU is allowing 25% capacity on campus for in-person concerts, but Bayer said he thinks it may go up to 50% by the time the school year starts, which would allow him to do his two-concert idea.
According to Bayer, next year’s classes and musical rehearsals will be a hybrid of some students on campus and some learning from home. For online learners, similar platforms and resources are being used to the ones they used last school year, and tactics for in-person learners such as outdoor rehearsals are being considered by music teachers.
Choir students used an application called Jacktrip last year. Jacktrip is a sophisticated software used to better sync audio Zoom, to avoid lag when students are singing, according to the AU website. “The results were dramatic” according to Patty Housman, assistant director of communications in the College of Arts and Sciences. It may be possible that such softwares are likely going to be for online students going into this year again at AU, according to Bayer.
The lack of communication has been ongoing, Bayer said. At the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, many things were up in the air. “The communication from [AU administration] the entire time was just unclear,” said Hallie Baum, a 2021 AU graduate who was a chamber singer in the music program. To her, the administration never provided any clear plans or information about what faculty and students could or couldn’t do.
Baum said she appreciated how hard the administration worked to come up with a plan for last school year. Even so, because of how unpredictable things were, everything was much harder to accomplish due to the lack of communication and detail, which even led to some losing hope in the program.
“It was just impossible to rehearse,” Baum said. Even though she continued to be a chamber singer, there were still moments where she and many others felt unsure about the program.
“There’d be weeks and weeks on end where we were just spending hours of everyone having issues. It just wasn’t working out.”