Photo courtesy of the Choate Arts Department
From the playful and lighthearted to the delicate and graceful, the Winter Concert indulged the Choate community with its yearly performance on Friday, March 26. At the end of every winter term, the Winter Concert showcases the hard work of music students and faculty. This year, instead of gathering in Colony Hall, the Winter Concert was virtual, offering recordings of performances made both in-person and virtually.
To kick off the 55-minute program, the Jazz Ensemble performed three pieces under the guidance of Jazz Ensemble Director Mr. Matt McLean. Then, Mr. Gene Wie, the Instrumental Ensembles Director, conducted the combined String and Symphony Orchestras in performing “Carnival of the Animals” by Camille Saint-Saëns and “Adoration” by Florence Price. An array of vocal and instrumental performances by Arts Concentration musicians concluded the performance.
Leading up to the concert, Mr. Wie prepared a computer-generated backing track for orchestra students to practice with. He used sample libraries of live recordings by professional musicians to put the track together on Logic Pro, an audio-editing software. He plans to continue using these tracks so that musicians are able to listen to a piece before going into rehearsal.
String Orchestra violinist Emeka Nwogugu ’23 said that his biggest challenge while preparing for the concert was learning and perfecting the pieces in a short amount of time, especially after a break from in-person rehearsals due to remote learning. “We were having a hard time playing the whole piece at once, so we recorded it section by section for the concert. We would practice a section twice, and Mr. Wie would record our third run-through,” Nwogugu said.
During the recording of the concert, string and percussion musicians gathered in Colony Hall to record live. Mr. Wie used two types of microphones for the large group recordings — the cardioid condenser, which captures the overall sound of the orchestra effectively, and the ribbon microphone, which can better record instruments with higher frequencies including flute and violin. He also set up cameras throughout Colony Hall to record videos of the students.
This videotape was then sent to wind, brass, and remote musicians, who recorded their parts while listening to the recording of their in-person cohort through their headphones. “I set up my phone or iPad about four or five feet away and started playing as I normally would,” said Sarah Hudson ’21, a trombone player in both the Jazz Ensemble and Symphony Orchestra.
While the Symphony Orchestra performance comprised of a combination of individual and in-person group recordings, students in the Jazz Ensemble recorded their parts individually in the PMAC Recital Hall in December. Their instruments, predominantly wind and brass, prevented them from gathering due to Covid-19 protocols. The wind and brass musicians played along to an audiotape recorded by the rhythm section of the ensemble, including the piano, double bass, and drums.
In post-production, Mr. Wie used Logic Pro to mix the audio from in-person group recordings, remote students who only submitted audio files, and those who submitted both audio and video recordings. “Mixing audio is all about being able to make a good judgement on how a piece would sound best when all the parts are combined,” Mr. Wie said.
Mr. Wie made corrections to fix small blemishes in pitch, balance, and timing. However, he refrained from overly engineering the recording. “As advanced as our ensembles are, we are still a high school orchestra. We shouldn’t be hiding the fact that there will sometimes be mistakes in a live performance,” he said.
The video clips of more than 60 musicians were edited with Final Cut Pro, a video-editing software. “The videos weren’t exactly timed with the audio, because my focus was on making the audio sound good, even if the visual experience wasn’t exactly perfect,” he said. “However, software tools now are better than they’ve ever been before. I am using tools that can adjust videos frame by frame so they are as in sync as they can be.”
“I really hope to be able to perform live in the future,” Nwogugu said. “If not, I see us doing a recording again and it being a huge success because we know how to manage it now.”
