Britain’s choirs are facing oblivion

Britain’s choirs are facing oblivion. Yet they’re also terrified of returning. One story explains why. Picture this innocent choral-society scene in Skagit County, Washington State, on the evening of 10 March. One-hundred-and-twenty singers, most of them elderly sopranos, gathered in the Presbyterian church to rehearse for two hours, their chairs 15cm apart. At half-time they took a break for shared snacks, and at the end the helpful ones stayed to stack the chairs.

Fifty-two of those singers came down with Covid-19, supposedly through the release of aerosol droplets in the ether. Thus began the swirling of rumours across the world about the grave dangers of singing. It has still not lifted, in spite of the pleas of choral directors that it was the finger food and the chair-stacking rather than the singing that spread the disease, and that those people were old, whereas many cathedral choirs have no one over the age of 40, and that if you hold a candle flame in front of a well-trained singer, the flame will not even flicker, so controlled is his or her breath.

This week, in an operating theatre at the government’s science facility at Porton Down, a small group of guinea-pig choral singers, some professional and some amateur, are taking part in experiments to measure what happens to those aerosols — droplets measuring five-thousandths of a millimetre or less — when they are emitted by the singing voice. Similar experiments are going on in London, conducted by Declan Costello, a consultant surgeon specialising in the human voice who also happens to be a tenor in Polyphony and the Holst Singers. ‘A lot is resting on these experiments,’ he tells me. ‘If the result is not what we want to hear… well, at least Public Health England can make a decision based on science.