Christmas without music? Churches find a way out

The first notes of O Come, All Ye Faithful ring forth from some of the organ’s 2,200-plus pipes, creating a soaring herald that welcomes worshippers to St. James Catholic Church in Louisville, Ky., on Christmas Eve. For the church’s music season this is the liturgical Super Bowl, an event planned months and months in advance. The voices of 36 choristers mix with the organ, a trumpet, a baritone horn, a violin, cymbals and the thundering timpani, as 400 congregants, packed cheek by jowl, join in. Some arrive an hour early to get a seat.

This December, at St. James and churches around the country where the joy of Christmas is channelled through music, the celebration is, of course, different. Given the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 people in the country, all that Hines, the church’s 63-year-old music director, can think about is how dangerous the night he looks forward to all year has become.

A soprano’s solo may now carry not just glad tidings. The coughs of parishioners that once merely punctuated the music could be a public health hazard. But there was no way Hines, who has weathered a soloist with laryngitis and an ice storm that stranded choristers, was calling off Christmas. “I’ll bring the message of Christ’s birth to people however I can,” he said. So this year, Hines has fashioned his “quarantine quartets” — groups of four who will sing at St. James’s Christmas Eve and Day services, accompanied by a violinist and percussionist, masked and socially distanced in the choir loft above the sanctuary.

His flautist and his trumpeter of 32 years, a former principal in the Louisville Orchestra, will watch from home.

“And I don’t blame them,” Hines said.

“But it meant I had to put on my thinking cap.” This is the mission music directors across the country are facing this Christmas. If the normal year presents the challenge of deciding between “Joy to the World” and the Hallelujah chorus, this season the question is how to celebrate the birth of Christ without creating a potential super-spreader event.

Some churches, like Trinity Church Wall Street in Manhattan, are downsizing choirs and orchestras that might number more than 80 members to single-digit choristers for services they are streaming without congregations. St. John United Methodist Church in Augusta, Ga., recorded 85 current and former choir members singing the John Rutter carol “What Sweeter Music” individually, as well as three violinists and a cellist playing inside their homes, to create a video that will be shown during a pre-recorded service on Christmas Eve.

Middle Collegiate Church in New York’s East Village, whose sanctuary was destroyed in a fire this month, recorded a video that now includes footage of a dancer both twirling around the sanctuary 16 hours before the fire — possibly the last person inside before it burned — and dancing outside the structure’s blackened skeleton.

“It will make you weep every tear,” the Rev.

Jacqui Lewis, the church’s senior minister, said. The church will also be streaming its 2018 CBS Christmas special on Christmas Eve.

But the Rev. Gary Padgett, the pastor of St. James in Louisville, said that even with all the pre-recorded concerts and worship services available, it was important to the church to film its own music in house. “I always felt like if a member could see their own building, and their pastor, and the people they know performing music they’re used to hearing, it helps recapture some of the tradition,” he said.