Source: Lansing State Journal article, Friday, October 2, 2020
by Matthew Dae Smith

There's a new garage band in East Lansing, a chorale made up of 15 graduate students in the Michigan State University College of Music's choral music conducting program.

They project their voices Monday through Friday into the void of the nearly empty concrete parking garage adjacent to the Kellogg Center on Harrison Road. The layers of their voices resonate as if they're singing in a temple or cathedral. 

The third floor of a parking garage is their safe space from a virus that primarily infects the lungs and airways, spreads through the air and circulates more potently when an infected individual is singing.

"It's a very safe place to be," David Rayl, director of choral programs at the College of Music says. "It's gratifying for those of us who do chorale music to actually be able to have human beings together singing, because we didn't have that all spring and all summer. I don't worry about possible (COVID-19) transmission because of the fresh air circulating in the garage." 

See video interview with choir members and David Rayl.

Step inside the garage and you'll find a group of masked twenty-somethings wearing safety goggles.  Their snout-shaped masks protrude outward, designed to give singers the unencumbered space needed to breathe inward without inhaling the mask itself. The goggles protect them from aerosol transmission through the eyes.

Spread eight feet apart, students rehearse pieces such as Mozart's "The Litany the Virgin Mary." The solemnity in their voices reverberates, seem to magnify the lament in their songs. 

"It is not unlike singing in a cave or great big cathedral," Rayl says.  "It's a little cumbersome, and it has its challenges, but we're able to do it."

Connie Gamage accompanies the chorale with an electric piano. She says the responsibility the students are taking for each other is "uplifting."

"They're mature," she said. "They have this covenant amongst themselves to stay safe and minimize their exposure.  They know the individual responsibility they take for their own health allows them the privilege to make music together as a group - so they take it very seriously."  

Colleen Chester, an alto-mezzo graduate student, said the students are "getting used to the variables in the space and now we're able to make music together." 

"Most of my colleagues are not able to make music right now," she said, "so every day I feel really grateful to come and gather and make music with one another."