Submitted by Sounds of Aloha on
Separated from one another's voices, and trying to bring a little musical comfort to our friends and neighbors while we all ride out the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sounds of Aloha Chorus decided to cobble together a virtual performance from their individual homes. We were overjoyed to be rejoined by some of our long-distance members, from as far away as our friend Sig Rønbeck above the Arctic Circle in Norway!
Here's the message we sent out on April 11, 2020, and which we extend to you:
The Sounds of Aloha Chorus hopes all of our friends are faring well during these difficult and disruptive times.
We think few things in life can be more comforting, reassuring, and heartening than the power of music.
In celebration of National Barbershop Quartet Day, we offer a song that we hope will help us all find and celebrate the silver linings in the current situation while we look forward to brighter days.
Be well.
Postscript: When we released this recording, we honestly were unprepared for the response. It aired multiple times on every Hawaii television station and was viewed tens of thousands of times online from people all over the country, on our YouTube posting and on the TV stations' websites. People wrote telling us they wept when they watched it and that it brought them so much comfort at just the right time. It's easy to forget now just how scary the COVID pandemic was in the early days amid skyrocketing cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, no vaccine in sight, and an almost complete shut-down -- with so many of us feeling profoundly alone. Now that we've all seen many virtual, distanced recordings like this from renowned music groups all over the world, it's also easy to forget how unfamiliar video communication still was to most people then, and how novel something like this performance was. And maybe the fact that we were just a bunch of ordinary guys trying in our small way to offer a measure of reassurance, with what might be called beautiful imperfection, had something to do with it too. We were and are beyond grateful for the heartfelt outpouring. It's great to be a barbershopper.
