Leandra Merea Strope

^{AUGUST 18, 2022}

Updated Covid Protocols coming soon!

^{JULY 13, 2021}

Dear Parents,

I am looking forward to seeing your children in person this fall. As I write this (July 13, 2021), the newscast playing in the background is saying Covid cases are rising significantly in the US as a result of the Delta variant, and the rate of vaccinations has slowed. When I go out of my home into the public, few people are wearing masks. Sometimes, interacting with strangers in public, it’s hard for me to remember that we are still in the middle of a global pandemic! It is important for us to stay vigilant.

We know that singing is a particularly efficient way to pass the coronavirus from person to person. This is because when we breathe well, we use a lot of the air in our lungs. As our lungs empty, the alveoli collapse. When they refill with air, the damp sides of the alveoli pull away from each other and create tiny particles of aerosol. These particles are so small that they can stay aloft in the air, and they are carried with the strong breath we send out when we sing. They then move easily into the air that everyone in the room breathes. (Listen to the April 18, 2021 episode of The Daily podcast (NYT) entitled “The Sunday Read: ‘Voices Carry’” for a better description of this and to hear the story of the Skagit Valley choir, an early covid super-spreader event.)

I’m no scientist (and am quite sure the picture of this process that’s in my imagination is quite oversimplified), but I am deeply concerned about keeping the singers and staff who are involved with Sisters’ Voices safe. I am moving toward the coming season with plans for us to be together and singing in my home where we will have control over cleanliness, foot traffic, and, most importantly, ventilation.

I have had an environmental engineer who specializes in aerosols visit my home and consider with me the safest ways to sing there. She made several recommendations – 

First, that as much as possible we keep windows open in our rehearsal space and keep the house’s central exhaust fan running, drawing air out through the attic. This fan will pull in fresh air from outdoors and completely replace the air in the space every few minutes. She gave me a CO2 monitor that measures CO2 in the space – this doesn’t tell us about the virus in the air, but it does tell us how much the indoor air is affected by the breath of the people there. We can monitor the space to keep that number close to outdoor air and adjust our ventilation (or move outdoors) when the amount of CO2 in the air goes up. 

She also suggested that when we can’t ventilate with outdoor air, as in the middle of winter when it’s too cold outside, we use an air purifier with a HEPA filter to circulate the air and filter out things as small as viruses.

Her third recommendation was to install HEPA filters in my home HVAC system. When I brought in the people who maintain my system, it was not clear that my system can handle HEPA level filters, but I will continue to explore this possibility.

These are the things we are doing:
– Ventilating the space well
– Filtering indoor air when outdoor ventilation is very uncomfortable
– Holding rehearsals and activities outdoors when feasible and/or necessary
– Moving to Zoom when covid numbers in the community present unsafe circumstances for gathering
– Distancing (in line with CDC recommendations) when not singing and adding extra space when singing
– Requiring masks of all participants until we have all been vaccinated. We will communicate with parents before moving to unmasked rehearsals, and we will not contact parents about this until vaccines are available for everyone in the ensemble. That means if all middle school participants have been vaccinated at the start of the season, we will begin a conversation with parents about the safety of singing together unmasked. It is not ideal to sing with masks on, but it is worth our safety. 

What we ask of parents and singers:
– If you are sick, please stay home. I will work with you to get you caught up with what you missed. If you are a member of SV-Three or SV-Four, we have built in some flexibility this year to hopefully give you the possibility of making up some rehearsal time if you miss a day.
– Please come to rehearsals in a well-fitting mask and keep it on as long as you are in rehearsal.
– Please use the bathroom before coming to reduce the need for shared surface contact (although there will be a bathroom available that you’ll be very welcome to use, and we’ll wipe it down between rehearsals).
– Please follow instructions in rehearsals about keeping distance and keeping your rehearsal supplies in your own space. 

We will update this post as needed this year. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you have questions or concerns about this, or anything! I’m looking forward to getting started with the girls again and to hearing their voices in all sorts of contexts! Thank you so much for your support. 

Warmly,
Leandra

People learn to sing as they learn language.  A child who is surrounded by singing will learn to sing in tune by the time she is using language, sometimes earlier.  Like any language or form of expression, the earlier we learn the more easily it comes. And also like any language or form of expression, the window on a person’s ability to learn to sing is open throughout life.

If your child is not yet matching pitch, here are some things you can do to help.

1. Never let your child hear you doubt her ability to learn to sing beautifully! She needs you to believe in her ability to learn. (And she CAN learn, so there’s no need to doubt it.)
2. Join your child in experimenting with her voice. Slide from your lowest voice to your highest voice and back again. A lot. Practice talking in a high voice. Add an interesting accent. Make up fancy voices for stuffed animals or pets. Pretend to be a famous chef while you’re cooking with your child and speak in a new way. Build vast vocal inflection. Vocal experimentation, learning everything your voice can do, is important. Demonstrate it, join in with it, enjoy it.
3. Make it a game – start on any note and sing upward from there, by step or by skip or sliding. Move up and down. Use your hand to show the direction, have the voice lead the hand and then the hand lead the voice. Have your child conduct you in the same way. Do this together, whether or not you are singing the same pitches.  
4. Have your child sing a pitch, then stop, then try singing the same pitch again. Keep coming back to it. See how long you both can remember that same pitch.
5. Matching pitch is a function of hearing a pitch and being able to reproduce the frequency with the voice. If a person has functioning ears and brain and vocal folds that have some flexibility, she can learn to sing. Sing a long tone. Sing it again. Have your child listen to it and imagine her voice doing it too (imagination is key, as in everything).  If she doesn’t sing the same pitch that you sang, find something about her singing that was positive – she was listening really hard, what she sang was thoughtfully produced and lovely, she matched your volume. If she has trouble singing the same note as you, have her start and then you match her note. Help her understand what it feels like – the actual physical sensations – of singing the same note at the same time as another person. This vibration is healthy. It can be meditative. Try often, and it will come.
6. Sing often, every day, or if you are not comfortable singing, turn on music that is being sung in the range of middle C and higher. This may feel quite high to you, but it is natural for a child. Refrain from listening only to modern pop singers, especially those who are singing aggressively or whose voices are raspy or sound strained – this sound is highly sought after in the pop world these days, but it is not healthy and leads to vocal problems.  Encourage high, light, flexible flute-like sounds – this is called Bel Canto, or Beautiful Singing, and once a singer has developed the skills to sing in this way, she can move to other styles and develop her own sound with a strong vocal and physical foundation.
7. In Sisters’ Voices we work to point out what singers are doing well. They usually already know when they’re not doing well, so we find strengths and build around them, and we encourage the singers to notice each other’s strengths. Notice when your child is making a beautiful sound, remembering words accurately, making up her own words, enjoying making weird vocal sounds, singing for a long time without taking a breath, standing strong and flexible, watching the conductor, connecting symbols to sounds – notice her experimentation and progress. Encourage her skills, and the rest will come. Singing is a natural form of vocal expression for humans, and your child will learn to do it if she sticks with it! (You too!)

Summer camp is a fun time to get to know other singers and to dig into some of the skills we use in Sisters’ Voices rehearsals.

We start each day with stretching – warming up our bodies (because singing is a full-body physical activity!) and our voices. Usually this involves some yoga-like meditative slow stretching, deep breathing, and exploring the many sounds our voices can make. It also often involves some tai chi-like movement, working for balance, connection to our breath, and continuous motion.

After we have warmed up we sing! Camp singing is aimed at developing a beautiful sound together using folk songs and canons from our songbook and beyond.  

Singers have time during the day to move around to centers that support the exploration of anatomy (especially how bones and muscles work together to support breath and physical alignment or posture), tongue twisters (to help develop great enunciation and diction), solfege, jumping rope with rhymes, and the International Phonetic Alphabet (that can help us learn to sing in other languages). There is also ample time for playing games as a large group, practicing solos and small ensemble pieces, eating, beading, drawing, talking with friends … 

Singers of all levels of experience and skill are welcome to join in this fun and supportive summer adventure!