With the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been significantly harder to meet in person, which is a key aspect in collaborative art and music classes. They’ve had to change many ways of how they learn and cooperate with each other. 

For both band and orchestra students, playing music together is one of the most important parts of the classes. Since coronavirus restrictions have left them staying at home, it has been much more difficult to collaborate and create music.

“It’s more individual instead of working as a group,” junior Randi Lind said. “It’s really difficult to have a marching band performance because we are normally outside and all together…we’ve had a lot of kids drop out [because of that].” 

Although it is not fully immersive in-person involvement, band students do get to meet a few times per week in small groups to collaborate and practice on playing pieces, while still following COVID guidelines.

Band, orchestra, and choir classes have also been using the app Collabra to overlay their sounds into a full composition, which helps create a sense of “together” in these times where we all must be so separate.  

“Using Collabra has made orchestra the best that it can be without being in person,” junior Noor Eqal said. “I think that the methods orchestra has been using are effective and easy to adapt to.”

Students have varying opinions on how their music classes are going during online learning, nevertheless, there is still an overarching theme of positivity within all of them.

“It’s not as successful as in-person is but we’re definitely making it work,” senior Lucy Nunnelley said.

Teachers, who have been the ones to make the many changes, have tried to make the circumstances easier on their students as it is very stressful to get work done now. 

“We have reduced the number of pieces that we perform in a semester [because] everything takes so much longer,” choir teacher Mrs. Tiffany Marsh said. “I have been so impressed with their creativity and their willingness to adapt to all of these changes.”

The cons of not being able to meet seem like they would outweigh the pros, but students in all classes have experienced highlights, whether big or small. Musical Theatre put on a Zoom play, orchestra has been developing a virtual concert, and choir put out a virtual concert on YouTube as well. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has been very challenging for students, but nothing can stop the students and staff at Dunbar from producing top-quality music and art.