The college recently announced that going forward the campus will be closed to students that are still attending in-person classes. The news came as the few remaining music classes taking place on campus planned for their spring semester.
Members of the bands had been practicing in the east Carlsen Center parking lot; however, they will soon have to get comfortable with rehearsing online. Ryan Heinlein, the director of instrumental activities at the college plans to move everything to Zoom.
“The bands have just finished the semester, so the campus shutdown will not have an effect on us,” Heinlein said. “We will have sectionals and walkthroughs of music via Zoom the first five or six weeks.”
The east parking lot has also been home to the college’s choirs since the beginning of the Fall semester. Terri Teal, the college’s director of choral activities, has no plans to move rehearsals online.
“You really can’t do choirs by Zoom; you can’t,” Teal said. “You can’t have a choir session with everybody on Zoom because it just makes a cacophony of sound because everybody, their lag time from one person’s computer to another, and how it all comes through together is just a disaster.
Teal plans to have students learn their music through Canvas until Spring Break and resume socially distanced in– person rehearsals afterwards.
“It would be easier in some ways not to have choir right now, but they want to sing and they [Students] want to participate,” Teal said. “What we’re trying to do is do it as safely as possible and where we can still have an educational benefit from that.”
Thomas Ransom, a songwriting teacher who was still holding classes on campus, is not looking forward to the Spring Semester.
“I hate online, online is stupid,” Ransom said. “Students can just go on YouTube and find somebody to teach them, as far as I’m concerned. That’s why I’m on campus, because I don’t think online instruction is valuable, personally.”
Ransom worries that without the use of on campus facilities, he won’t be able to teach his class effectively.
“We have a full-blown recording studio at our disposal,” Ransom said. “In the second hour of class we generally take their [Students] ideas and record them for them to finish. That’s the main thing that we would miss.”