Singing the High Notes over Zoom

Karolína Berková teaches voice – this semester she has five students (including 2 men ). At the beginning of the semester she was looking forward to working on duets with the different voices of the students in the group – two baritones, a soprano. Unfortunately that didn’t work out, but she’s discovered that it’s possible to teach voice at a distance.

by Karolína Berková

We were all thrown into the water.  On Tuesday March 10th I taught in person, and then – as the restrictions of the Czech and US governments increased – by Wednesday we had switched to online classes.  That day I came to NYU; Kája Jiřelová had set up a computer for me. The worst part was figuring out how to send students an invitation to our class via Zoom.  The first hour was terrible – I wanted to cry.  I put 300% of my energy  into the class, but it still didn’t seem to work.  But this was our situation, and we had to figure it out.  

I realized early on that I needed to find the positive side of this strange time.  I live in Tabor [a town about 100 km south of Prague] , and it was great to be home and to have time to do things that I don’t usually have time for- to go on walks, to work in the garden.  I started to get used to seeing a person on the screen rather than a person live.  I can spend one hour in Pennsylvania, the next in Texas, then in Colorado, and then I can sit in my garden in South Bohemia.  It never would have occurred to me that this would be possible.  

At first I had some challenges because of sound – when you teach singing, you really need to have the sound on Zoom work.  At a faculty meeting for the music professors, I spoke to my colleagues about it.  Jiří Levíček and Cyrille Oswald, who are real professionals when it comes to technical things, helped me- somehow they made my computer start to access the voice better.  It’s also forced the students to work harder and to be more independent – because they can’t hear all of the tones of the piano over Zoom, they have to find the right tones on their own, and depend on their own ears.  

Another of the biggest problems for me is the signal connection.  My students have had to carry their computers around their house, trying different rooms, until they found the best place for WIFI.  Some days it works excellently, some days not really at all.  Yesterday we even heard the high notes of one of my students – maybe the computer is also getting used to this strange situation.