In the cold rain, as night fell on a church parking lot strewn with leaves, a choir and the community that finds faith in it came together again late Sunday afternoon.
The choir of St. Anne’s in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Lincoln performed its first live Evensong service together in months — and their first-ever service with each singing in his or her own car, holding a microphone, peering out the windshield at a distant conductor, and listening intently to the radio.
“Singers really need to sing together,” said Jay Lane, choirmaster at the church, before the service. “We’ve missed it and this is one way to do it.”
Wireless microphones were live-mixed at a sounding board and then broadcast on an open FM radio frequency, to which choir members and congregants tuned their car radios. An organ part that Lane recorded the day before — to free his hands for conducting — was also mixed in.
Atop a hill in the lot, the conductor stood beneath a canopy lit by fluorescent lights, gazing down upon about 40 cars filled with song, about half with choir members. Outside, the hum of about 20 singers rose from their cars above the din of rain.