Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful

During the last nine months my calling at church as choir director has been essentially on hold. Then, shortly before Thanksgiving, I was asked to put together a virtual choir number. This would be a large undertaking and I knew it depended more on Bryan's willingness to edit it together than on mine to gather in the submissions. He said yes and the music chair and I got to work contacting people in our congregation who had sung with the choir in the past to see if they would be interested in participating. Not everyone said yes, but to those that did we sent an email with an instructional video, an accompaniment video of me directing, and a list of specific instructions. We counted up all those that had said yes and estimated we would have between twenty-one and thirty-two participants. We set a deadline for the videos to be sent in to give Bryan enough time to put it together.

The weekend of the deadline brought texts, phone calls, and emails explaining that people were either too busy, too anxious, or too stressed learning their part. We found a few fixes and extended the deadline. Then we extended it again. The song would be shown on Sunday December 20 and by the evening of December 17 we had, not including our family, eight submissions.

I panicked and sent one more email asking people to help, letting them know that we needed their voices.

We didn't receive any more videos.

On the morning of Saturday December 19 we asked Phoebe and Sophie to put on church dresses and let us record them singing the soprano part, then Bryan recorded himself singing both the tenor and the bass parts. We already had recordings of me singing the soprano and the alto lines. That brought us up to fourteen vocal parts and twelve videos, since we wouldn't be using anyone's face twice.

Bryan spent nearly the entire day and most of the night editing the sound and video. The first time he layered the audio parts on top of each other and played it for me I cried because it was awful. I had faith in his abilities, but the voices and the timing were all so different I didn't know how he would make it work. After several hours of tinkering and tweaking and calling me down to the basement to listen and give feedback, he had a final version. As he played it for me I cried again, but this time because it was so beautiful. Is it perfect? No, but it is certainly more than the sum of its parts. He is a wizard. Seriously.

With the permission of the participants, I share our virtual ward choir's rendition of Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful. The accompaniment comes straight from churchofjesuschrist.org, we have permission to use it.

Merry Christmas!