Neighborhood Music School Leans Into The Lag

Marvin Warshaw, conductor for the Greater New Haven Concert Orchestra out of Neighborhood Music School, looked at his rapidly filling Zoom meeting.

“Oh, good, everyone’s joining in. Do you all have your Beethoven parts?” he said.

“I wanted to look at the Allegro, where it starts forte at 29.”

To warm up, he said, ​“let’s try playing along with the recording. This is the Berlin Philharmonic. Everybody join in.”

The Greater New Haven Concert Orchestra is for middle-school-age students, and the ensemble was working on the first movement of Beethoven’s first symphony. This Monday, Warshaw had broken the orchestra into sections, meeting first with the woodwinds, and going over just a few measures of music at a time.

“What is difficult or tricky about this passage?” Warshaw asked. Mia, a clarinetist, answered. ​“I think it’s 43” — she meant measure 43 — ​“just getting over the break.”

“Right, your change of register in the clarinet,” Warshaw said. He ran the same passage instrument by instrument, going over the difficulties each musician faced. Joyce, a flautist, had the same change in register. Evan, on oboe, had ​“tricky fingering.”

“I think the violins will say the same,” Warshaw said. They went over practicing techniques, breaking the section into smaller pieces (called ​“chunking”) and adding one note at a time; starting slower and gradually speeding the passage up. Then they went over the articulation of the piece, with Warshaw explaining how, as the conductor, he would like them to interpret the piece. He sang the articulation he wanted — yum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.

“Everybody mute. I’ll conduct,” he said. Everyone played. On the Zoom meeting itself, there was silence. But Warshaw could see from the musicians’ movements that they were following his hand. There was a final question for Warshaw before the sectional was over.

“There’s a half note with forte,” he said. ​“What does Beethoven mean?”

Ellie, a bassoonist, said, ​“maybe it builds up to something louder?”

Warshaw agreed. Beethoven was cranking up the tension by making the musicians play the same marking over and over. ​“Listen to me! Listen to me!” Warshaw said, vocalizing the intent of the passage. ​“It’s like nagging.”

Unsung Heroes

Warshaw’s ensemble was one of many that Neighborhood Music School is still running — virtually — during the Covid-19 pandemic. Noah Bloom, executive director of NMS, reported that about three quarters of the school’s individual lessons are still going, meaning close to 900 of the school’s enrollment of 1,200 at the beginning of the semester are still receiving instruction. All of the school’s dance classes are still running, over 50 per week. About a quarter of the ensembles, including the Greater New Haven Concert Orchestra, still are. NMS’s preschool is closed. Its middle school, Atlas, is still running.

Which means NMS’s teachers have learned, on the fly, how to conduct classes online that traditionally depend on everyone being in the same room, watching each other and listening intently.

“The format we’ve been using for dance is that we invite our students into the Zoom meeting. We have social time. Once the instruction starts, we mute the classes,” said Tracey Albert, who chairs NMS’s dance department and teaches several classes. ​“Then we unmute everyone, or just a single person.”

Conducting the classes online has meant learning how to troubleshoot technical problems fast. ​“The interesting or challenging thing is what device people are using in class or teaching with,” she said. An iPhone is more limited. ​“An iPad is a next step up. A laptop is a next step up.”

“I’m not a huge tech person, but I’ve never been afraid to explore and check stuff out,” she said. ​“I think there were some other dance faculty that were less assured.” Albert began by familiarizing herself with Zoom’s platform and figuring out what it was capable of, what she could use in her classes. Then she taught the rest of the faculty as needed.

“Teaching, and reteaching, and reteaching. And that’s where the emotional part comes in,” Albert said. ​“How do you talk someone off the ledge at 9 p.m.” because of technical difficulties? she asked. ​“In the beginning it was way more stressful. Now we’re starting to settle in.”

Certain aspect of class could be replicated. Before the pandemic, in one part of the class, students sat in a circle while one of them danced and the accompanist played. Over Zoom, at first ​“it was just watching a tiny speck” when they tried it. They reconfigured the screen mode in Zoom, and learned to position cameras. The same function allowed other dancers to mirror one another. ​“They got to have more of an interactive experience with each other,” Albert said.

The drive for human connection that brings so many people to dance classes is in full force as the stresses of the pandemic affect the lessons. ​“I have an adult ensemble that are new at building choreography,” Albert said. ​“Two weeks ago one of the dancers messaged me and said, ​‘I’m not feeling creative — this is hard.’ So we changed our class.” They work on technique and ​“mindfulness stuff” instead. The class is ​“still bonding together as an ensemble. We want it to be good.”

The dance class — like all the music classes — is also running up against a technical limitation that makes truly playing music or dancing together impossible: there is a lag in time while the information passes over the internet. It’s barely noticeable when you’re having a conversation, but when you try to play or dance together, the lag feels as wide as the Grand Canyon.

“I’m three beats ahead of where I see the dancers,” Albert said, of when she leads a dance. They can dance with her. She can’t dance with them. ​“I feel like I’m working harder when I’m teaching because there’s no way to feel or have the energy.” Teaching over Zoom made Albert realize ​“how much I depend on the energy from my students to help me move through the class. I’m having to manifest that energy myself.”

It has also made certain aspects of her instruction impossible. ​“I’m very hands on as far as teaching or correcting my students’ form,” she said. ​“I find myself wanting to physically move their body and that can’t happen.” Sometimes the platform yields information. A certain camera angle might let Albert see a problem in a dancer’s form she may not have noticed. But ​“the technology is getting in the way a little bit.”

“How can I be my best self in this?” she has asked herself. It will do for now — it will get them through the outbreak — but students and teachers alike ​“like it way better when we can be in the same room with the students,” Albert said.

Mary Bloom, director of music education and a piano teacher at NMS, gives between 35 and 45 lessons a week to students ranging in age from children to adults in their 80s. ​“I’ve gotten a broad kind of view of how each lesson is different in person,” she said. It starts with the fact that ​“everyone has different technology.”

The school is working to keep some of its traditional structures in place. ​“We are about to launch a couple honors recitals,” she said. ​“I’ve been looking at a couple submissions today.” To create the performance, pianist Alexis Zingale recorded her accompaniment for the students to record to. The students then recorded themselves playing along to Zingale’s recording. ​“The first one I played, I was in tears,” Bloom said. ​“To see them dressed up and playing — it just spoke to the power of music in our lives.”

She said that each of NMS’s ensembles has been operating differently. Some, like the Greater New Haven Concert Orchestra, ​“are moving toward a recording project,” she said. ​“I think one of the unsung heroes of Zoom is the mute button. Whoever thought that we should mute our students? But it really has helped in the ensembles. Teachers can zoom in and hear specific students.”

The overall thrust of the music programs ​“has definitely changed,” Bloom said. ​“It was always a performance focus and it really can’t be that, but it is amazing to see the creativity in teachers.” Instructors like Warshaw help their students ​“work on how to practice as an ensemble member.”

“It’s exciting — as imperfect as it is, we’ve seen some really good things come out of it,” she said. ​“One thing that I’ve always believed is that the teacher’s job is to give the student the tools they need” to ultimately teach themselves — in other words, part of a teachers’ work is ​“to make themselves increasingly dispensable.” For Bloom, that means adding steps to the students’ practice, trusting them more, and giving them more responsibility. ​“They have to demonstrate that they know the rhythm. It’s hard work but they’re starting to see that they’re making progress on their own,” a step toward ​“seeing every note on their own.”

Teachers and students have taken steps to overcome the latency issue. If their houses have landlines, they can play over the phone, which doesn’t have nearly the lag that internet communications does. More advanced students make videorecordings ​“when you want to hear a little subtlety in their playing,” Bloom said.

“Both faculty and students have embraced this as a creative challenge. These are the tools we have. How do we make this work?” said Gillian Eversman, programs and community engagement manager at NMS. For the most part, she said, families ​“have been willing to roll with it, and to share ideas.” To her, it speaks to music and dance lessons as more than instruction; it meets some of ​“the need for that community connection.”

“At the end of every class, they’re in a better mood,” she said of the students, reporting that ​“Thursday adult dance class has a virtual happy hour” scheduled elsewhere in the week.

As ensembles have been heading toward final recording projects for themselves, NMS has headed toward a schoolwide recording project, of ​“Meguru,” a hymn from Namibia. The project is spearheaded by Tom Duffy, who conducts NMS’s youth orchestra. ​“Anyone can participate,” Eversman said. ​“We can still make music together. It’s not the same as when we’re all together, but it is what we can do now, and we’re doing it.” Some students want to write their own parts. ​“It’s been inspiring.”

“We have a lot of students who are continuing their experience,” said Mary Bloom, through to the end of June, when NMS’s session ends. Eversman reported that at least two adult students bought smartphones to keep doing lessons. A few have added on lessons. ​“They have more time to practice and explore,” she said.

Now that NMS’s programming is virtual, Executive Director Noah Bloom said ​“we made a decision to launch a new online marketing campaign. We decided to extend our reach to Hartford and Fairfield.” Ten new students joined in first two days of the campaign.

But, he said, ​“none of us know what the future is going to look like,” and ​“we can’t gloss over the flip side of things: In this current situation inequities come to the surface,” and NMS, which serves a diverse population, sees that reflected in its students. ​“Students are having to do childcare at home because their parents are working. Or their homes are not good places to practice.” Eversman added that many students don’t have access to the devices or the internet connections they need.

“We have to think about how to solve those problems,” Bloom said. ​“It has put that into stark relief.”

The shutdown has also hit NMS’s faculty and staff in different ways, too. In addition to teaching at NMS, Eversman said, ​“some teachers have income to rely on from the school system.” But ​“others have ten different gigs and they’ve gone away, and it’s a huge amount of stress.”

NMS employed about 200 people and furloughed more than 40 of them with the shutdown. Staff who remained took salary cuts. Teachers who were teaching lost some students. New spring enrollments dropped; Bloom estimated that before the school’s new online initiative, it lost several hundred thousand dollars in revenue (its overall budget is about $5 million, $4 million of which is payroll). NMS received a PPP loan through the Small Business Administration, ​“a critical part of solving short term cash flow” problems, said Bloom. ​“But it won’t be a way to offset the huge revenue losses.” NMS’s summer programs account for 15 percent of the school’s net program profit, ​“so that will be really hard to overcome if we are closed,” Bloom said. Possible levels of tuition and fundraising next year remain unknown. But ​“there’s no doubt that the financial impact is going to be big.”

For Bloom, the current situation has kickstarted an ongoing conversation at NMS. ​“The staff and the board have been doing extensive work over the last year thinking about core values. How do we want to behave for the community?” he said. At its heart, it is about ​“our social contract — which is really up the community.”

He is reassured by the continuing demand for classes, and is cognizant of NMS’s longevity. ​“We are going to exist — we know that,” he said. ​“We were founded in 1911. We’ve been through two world wars, the Spanish flu. We are resilient, we know that. That’s in our DNA.”

“If you’ve ever heard me improvise, you know I can overcome failure quickly,” said Bloom, who is a trumpet player. ​“This is a time that calls on adaptiveness…. I think the loss will be felt for several years. All hands on deck to try to solve it and we will. We need that artist’s mentality to deal with something unprecedented. We are not going to go back as a society to the way it was before…. We are a building full of artists and we are bringing different ways of looking at things to the problem…. What we do as artists and educators is going to be relevant as ever.”

“Part of being an artist is getting in touch with your humanity. It’s being vulnerable,” Eversman said. ​“We’re all facing an existential threat. Connecting with people — it’s why people keep showing up when it’s so imperfect. This is the thing that reminds us of what it means to be human.”

The Strings That Bind

On Monday night, after the woodwinds, Warshaw turned to the first violin section. ​“I want to go from the Allegro. Check your tuning,” he said, holding up a tuner that intoned the pitches he wanted the strings to tune to. He had individual players volunteer to go through the section on their own.

When you’re watching an orchestra live, he said, ​“you can’t always hear what each individual player is doing but you can tell how they’re doing. What do you think is one of the obvious things?”

It was bow direction, the students responded, and what part of the bow the players were using.

“What else is happening? What kind of articulation? Is there a slur or a hook? And what’s the difference?”

The students looked again at their sheet music, noticing the specificity of Beethoven’s markings. ​“Make sure you lift your bow a little bit on the C. I think you’ll hear that on the recording.”

They moved to another section.

“What’s tricky about the bowing?” Warshaw asked.

“I think some of the bowing,” Ashley, a violin player, said, ​“because the notes jump around a little bit.”

“What about the bowing is extra complicated?” Warshaw asked.

“There are a lot of eighth notes tied to sixteenth notes so it’s constantly changing.”

Warshaw agreed. They went over finer details, of bow control, attack, and dynamics. ​“You can shorten the last note and lift the bow off the string,” Warshaw said. He lifted his violin to his shoulder. ​“Try that with me.”

They did. On the Zoom call, the students were muted; only Warshaw’s violin was audible. But you could tell the string section was playing along.

“Nice job! Thanks for playing for me and with each other,” Warshaw said.

“Thank you!” the students said back.