How We'll Learn to Sing Together When We're Far Apart

By the end of the month, more than three-quarters of the group had tested positive for coronavirus, and two were dead.For years I too have filed into a Presbyterian church every week for chorus rehearsal, joining 100-plus other amateur singers for a few hours to prep for thrice-yearly classical music concerts. My family members and neighbors may hear me singing live (let me apologize to them now for that troublesome jump to the high F in the Lacrymosa movement), but anyone who tunes in won’t; latency issues in video-conferencing make a synchronous performance at best uneven and at worst unlistenable.I’m not the only person in my household coping with a radically rethought approach to collaborative music. My 11-year-old son, who asked to be called Picklequack for this article, plays the keyboard in an all-kid band called Yzarc—that’s “crazy” spelled backwards, obvs—through a local San Francisco treasure/music school/gang of weirdos called Rock Band Land. Their song “The Hand Witch Thief” includes the lines, “The Pizza Guy was a witch/ Who stole hands from little kids/ To make chairs to massage/ His aching back." (If you are a parent in need of yet more ways to occupy your children, Rock Band Land’s weird and wonderful original stories are available on Soundcloud.)A few times a year, dozens of the Rock Band Land kid performers stream into an old Italian-American social club in San Francisco’s Mission district to play The Big Show. Yzarc won’t be able to create a version of their new song, “Pets,” until they’re all together again.The Rock Band Land staff has a new system for online music-making for its reimagined summer camp season—using a click machine, metronome, or metronome app, all set to the same speed, to help everyone sync up—but back in mid-April Kyle sent the "Pets" musicians a scratch track, which he assembled from recordings of himself playing each instrumental part. More than 100 years ago, the action and the music could coalesce only in person, not on screen.Today, since we can’t coalesce in person, we scramble to synchronize from our screens remotely.Instead of balalaikas, violins, guitar, and mandolins, today’s geographically distributed band of musical Pearlsteins plays guitar, piano, and sings from homes in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Frank’s brother David might perform New Orleans-style boogie woogie, my aunt Dorie might offer Andrew Lloyd Webber, and I’ll sit at the piano to fumble through a Chopin Nocturne or the Maple Leaf Rag. Sometimes David will improvise on the piano with my brother on the guitar, or my brother and I will sing our dad’s favorite Willie Nelson song, “I Gotta Get Drunk.” But we can’t keep proper eye contact, so it’s hard to signal when we should skip the last verse, and we’re never perfectly in sync.Our weekly Zoom gatherings can only mimic the jam sessions that typically conclude holiday dinners, when my parents’ living room might host a couple of people on piano, my brother on guitar, and my 99-year-old great uncle, a drummer, tapping along on his knee, while my son and nephews sneak extra dessert in the kitchen.