During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chamber Chorus Teacher Sarah Markovits recounted that the size of her class dropped amid a “wretched” Zoom experience, which made it “impossible” to sing choral music as a group.
However, she and her students persevered: “We adapted, we learned, we made it. All I could try to do was make it fun,” Markovits said. Returning from the pandemic, chorus had rebounded until last year, when 17 seniors graduated, sending the class into a rebuilding situation with fewer students.
Markovits and Instrumental Music Teacher David Merlin-Jones have both struggled to deal with inconsistent enrollment in their classes.
Chamber Orchestra, taught by Merlin-Jones, was hit hard by the pandemic. During the first year of COVID-19, the class enrolled 19 students. In 2023, after three students left during the add-drop period, it had only two. Last year, its numbers rose to six students, but this year, due to low enrollment, the class did not run.
This fluctuation in course enrollment was exacerbated by the pandemic, which Markovits and Merlin-Jones agree influenced music classes nationally. At Sidwell Friends, the pandemic’s lingering effects have forced music teachers to adjust and, in some cases, close classes.
With only three tenors in the chorus, Markovits must rearrange the music her group performs, either choosing pieces that lack tenor parts entirely or making the altos, the next-highest voice part after tenors, sing the tenor parts, which is hard on their voices. While “there are worse issues,” Markovits said, the dearth of tenors “totally changes the feeling of the song.”
Like Markovits, Merlin-Jones arranges music for smaller classes. “It’s up to the teacher to arrange the music and make it work,” he said, acknowledging the difficulty of working with fewer students.
“We’re seeing it in all of our peer schools, where numbers are down in all the chorus programs, significantly with kids whose voices have changed,” Markovits added. “COVID created a hole there that we’re still digging out of.” Merlin-Jones agreed that music class enrollment numbers in peer schools were lower than usual, saying that this trend even occurred at performing arts high schools.
Merlin-Jones also pointed out that many of the difficulties surrounding enrollment were already present before COVID-19 worsened them.
“I saw the enrollment issues coming even before COVID, because there’s two things that affect enrollment numbers in the high school… The way we offer classes [and] the economics of running the school,” he said.
According to Merlin-Jones, Sidwell did not historically offer instrumental music in the Upper School because its schedule did not allow for a class period or rehearsal time, similar to the current middle school schedule. When the instrumental music program was founded, instrumental music classes were built into the schedule similar to other subject classes.
“In the economics of a school, if you don’t have a certain enrollment in a class, it doesn’t make economic sense for the school to put that in there even though it might be something that the school wants,” Merlin-Jones said. “If you don’t have enough students, it’s hard to make it economical to run as a class scheduled like a math class or a science class,” he explained. “We saw it happening during COVID, we saw the numbers dwindling before COVID, but now it’s like a double whammy.”
He sees several reasons for the numbers drop among music classes. The first is the Middle School: “kids stopped playing due to COVID and we don’t have… a feeder program in our Middle School. If a kid isn’t already playing an instrument [in Middle School],” they might not pick one up in the Upper School. Merlin-Jones also mentioned the culture around music at competitive private schools. “I’m not saying people don’t want arts, it’s just a different stereotype on how essential it is in terms of time and accessibility,” he said.
In order to increase enrollment in music classes at Sidwell, Markovits advocates easing the process for students who wish to take multiple art electives at once, noting that it is “one of the things that creates stress on the music program – and performing arts in general.” Currently, students can only double up in art by dropping another course. Even then, according to Assistant Principal for Academic Affairs Nikolin Eyrich, “a request to double is not guaranteed… since [Sidwell] must make sure that students who need arts for graduation have priority registration.”
“When I was in high school, I was in band and I did choir outside of school. But there were semesters where I took choir or I took acting in addition to band,” Markovits said. “That was just part of being a well-rounded student.”
“If you play an instrument and you want to sing, you should play in both ensembles,” Merlin-Jones said, echoing Markovits. “It’s going to exponentially develop your musical growth.”
Merlin-Jones speculated about a “hybrid” scheduling option combining both seminar-style periods when students could move between different music groups, “in the once-a-week or twice-a-week rehearsal bloc,” and music classes taken to fulfill a requirement like the ones Sidwell offers today.
“I don’t know what the answers are for here, I just know that the scarcest resource is time. Kids want to do everything — they want to do multiple arts, too. It’s just really hard to accomodate,” he said.
In addition to noting the negative impacts of the pandemic, Markovits is optimistic about her program’s future, especially regarding the cohort of freshmen taking chorus this year.
“This is a really good group of ninth graders who wanted to be there, and this is going to pay dividends going forward as long as I make it fun enough so that they want to stay,” she said.
She is also “really hopeful that [chorus] can increase [its] visibility” by performing at the new Upper School campus next year.
“There are some really cool wide-open spaces in the new building and I’m hoping to do some pop-up chorus and get kids who are not in the program to see us more than just during the concerts,” she said. “Those kinds of things are going to help.”
Overall, “the good thing is that the work that [music teachers] do is fundamentally about bringing joy,” Markovits said. “If I can bring joy to children, that is what I will do… Hopefully we get more kids, but all I can do is keep doing what I’m doing.”
