Tasha Koontz
It Could Be a Renaissance

The purpose of this project is to provide a collection of transcriptions from the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. This project seeks to give a platform to all parts of the vocal performing arts to better understand the lived experiences and mentality of those professionals. In collecting stories from the COVID-19 pandemic, Tasha Koontz, soprano, chatted with me about the diverse effect that this has had on her life. Not only does she explore the reality of being a church musician and director, but also the effect that this has had on and emerging opera professional.

Tasha Koontz, soprano
Interviewed May 16, 2020

 TB: First off, I always like to start the interview with something positive. So what is the best thing that’s happened to you in the last week?

TK: Oh, I successfully edited my first choral project—my first virtual choral project. I haven’t done audio editing in a number of years, and video editing is a very new skill. I got to actually show it to people and see the reactions on their faces over Zoom, which was incredible. So much better than just a comment or a like on Facebook.

TB: How long did it take you to do that?

TK: The editing? It took me about seven hours to do about 16 audio tracks and 12 video files.

TB: How long is the video that was your final product?  

TK: I think it’s about two and a half minutes.

TB: So seven hours for about two minutes of music. Wow!

TK: It’s the [Thomas] Tallis, “If Ye Love Me,” it’s an old goodie for the church folk, but yes, I took quite a bit of time. Some of that was from me learning new software, and fighting with it a little bit and getting a feel for how it works. Some of it was just because there’s so much you have to do in real time.

TB: Wow, that’s crazy! So, for those who aren’t familiar with your career and about where you are in your life, would you mind giving a brief background on what you are doing now?

TK: So pre-COVID, I had a variety of musical jobs. I am the music director at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church of Del Mar, California, which is a full-time job. I am also an Associate Professor of Voice at MiraCosta Community College and am a private voice teacher as well. So my studio, including my college students, is about 15-20 students every week. Plus, I am an opera singer and professional singing musician; doing professional chorus work, as well as doing my own solo work. So competing and doing a variety of levels of contracts, many of which have been with San Diego Opera.

TB: You’re at that—may I call it emerging professional level? Where you're past the young artist programs, and you’re beginning to make some headway in the operatic community?

TK: Yes, exactly. I think that’s a really good way to put it. I’m definitely finding myself getting out of the young artist realm. Other than maybe the occasional prestigious young artist contract for a summer program. Like, I did Central City a few years ago, and I still think being a young artist somewhere like Santa Fe or Glimmerglass would be appropriate and great. Other than that, I’m getting more work in terms of principle contracts and solo concert contracts.

TB: So diving into the pandemic, could you tell me a little bit about where you were and how you first realized that your life was going to be directly affected by this situation?

TK: There were a couple of instances. I’ll confess I’m not a person who really keeps up with the news so much, partly because my work schedule is so full most of the time. So, I had heard about COVID, but not really thought about it, because it was something that was happening in other places and not really as much in the U.S. The first moment I really interacted with it and realized it was going to affect me and the people around me, was actually at my weekly staff meeting. I guess that was March 10th. We had about a three hour-long meeting, which is quite long for us. Mostly talking about what our plan was for how we were going to move forward and starting to make some plans and decisions about how we could possibly move forward with things, such as our church choir and worship.

      One of my first priorities in that meeting was making sure that my staff was taken care of. I consider myself very luck: I have a really fantastic employer. The Rector of my church started the meeting telling us all, “First of all, you all have unlimited sick leave, and I want you all to work from home as much as possible. Just getting that out of the way.” She was making sure we were taken care of and protected. Then my question became, what if we get to the point—which we did rather quickly—of not being able to have any in-person worship, in-person choir rehearsals, all that stuff? I still want to be able to pay my staff, because it’s not their fault that we’re not able to meet in person. Luckily, the immediate answer was “It’s already been budgeted for. We have the money to do it, so let’s continue to pay them for their full hourly pay every week.”

      At first, the plan was, we’re just going to proceed with caution and see how things go. The next day, I ended up having another meeting with the Rector and Associate Rector, where it became clear that the Bishop of our Diocese has said that she wanted only essential church gatherings. So, we had to figure out what that meant. At the end of the day that became that our actual church worship service was the only thing that could be called essential. So, I cancelled all of our choir rehearsals. I am so grateful that I did that, because of course, not long after that the article came out about the Seattle choir. [Coronavirus Choir Outbreak LA Times ] My reasoning for that—because that decision was left up to me—was that I could not live with myself if we had rehearsal and something happened to one of these people that I care about and who are my responsibility.  

      It seemed like that week every 24 hours was a new reality. You would make a plan and then have to change the whole plan again and come up with a new plan, it was incredibly stressful. I taught my last in-person lesson in my home on that Wednesday. Then I spent all day Thursday in my office packing up everything that I would need to be able to work from home. I took a single copy of every piece of music from our 800 piece plus music library, so that I could try to program services. I told all of my students by that Friday that I was going to move to an online-only lesson model. The research hadn’t really come out by that point, but anybody who sings knows that you just spit on each other all day long when you’re singing in close proximity. You’re moving air around and breathing on each other, so that just seemed like a bad idea at the time.

      I was very concerned about what the response would be from my students [about] moving to an online model. Again, I was very lucky. I really didn’t lose any students at first. Even from the beginning, I’ve only lost, I think, a total of four students out of twenty. So basically, I have been continually employed since this happened.

      Of course, all of my contracts were cancelled. I had a number of concerts lined up for March, April, May, and June, that were slowly cancelled one by one. Some of them were things that I was producing, so I cancelled them really early, knowing that it just wouldn’t work. I actually had one contract where I never formally got a cancellation notice, it was just assumed that it was not happening. Actually, that was supposed to happen today [May 16]. But, I feel like my quarantine experience has been really different from a lot of other people that I’ve spoken to, in that I feel like I’ve been working harder than I ever have in my whole life during this time.

TB: So let’s divide up the job: Voice studio has been going, not perfectly, but well?

TK: Yes, I’ve even gotten a couple of new students since this started. So it’s certainly remaining stable.

TB: Okay, and then church musician, you are doing probably even more work than you’ve done before?

TK: Yes, and my job there has changed quite a bit, because we can’t have our weekly rehearsals. I normally have two adult choirs and two children’s choirs that I’m in charge of at the church, with four services every weekend. Early on, I decided I wasn’t going to try to have weekly rehearsals online. Really, I wanted to have a weekly check-in and make sure that we’re staying connected and that we’re okay. So once a week, I meet with my adults for about an hour and we talk about a wide variety of things from, “Where are you getting your groceries from this week?” to, “Did you see that funny YouTube video?” I ask them a question every single week, which is, “What is something that made you happy this week? What is something you found joy in?” Because, I think it’s really easy for all of us to get caught up in all of the negative and very depressing feelings. I know I’ve been finding these really unique moments of joy from really small things that I would never have thought would bring me that much of a feeling before. Small things like, I got groceries delivered and had cheese in my house for the first time in weeks, or I saw a lizard when I was out on my run and it was cute.

      So my job there [at the church] has changed quite a bit and I’ve also taken on the task of recording and editing. I’m putting together all of our services, because we’re still doing all four services every weekend. We record them over two days, all together on Zoom, so that they still feel live and we can react to each other. I find that I need to do some post-editing work on those to edit out the occasional dog in the background and things that are wrong in the bulletins. I’ve been struggling a lot with how to get the audio quality to be exactly what I would like it to be for it to be consumable by the world at large. So I usually have to go through and mess with that a bit. A lot of my job in the service itself, for the most part, is that I am the one who’s singing all of the music. Up until this week, I really haven’t started to let go of that control and let other people do things, in terms of music. I didn’t want to do that until I felt like I could really explain what was needed. So now, that’s starting to happen more.  

TB: The third part of your work life is the professional singer portion. Can you tell me a little bit about those cancellations and what they mean to you? Obviously, financially, but also professionally, because when we aren’t working, we aren’t pushing into that next boundary.

TK: Pretty much everything that was cancelled was a concert of some kind. Although at this point, I’ve actually also had one of my 2021 opera contracts pushed to 2022. At this point, it’s still up in the air about whether the second 2021 contract will even happen. Of course, those were my two best contracts that I had managed to land yet, breaking through to new tiers in terms of the AGMA or American Guild of Musical Artists’ Schedule C. I was doing my first featured role, finally in a larger house. The other things that were cancelled these past couple of months, I was very excited about doing my first Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. That was going to be here locally and it was a collaboration amongst all of the community colleges, actually, coming together with their orchestras and their choruses for this major work. I was really excited to do something that I had never done before, have an excuse to learn it, and do it in a fairly low stress setting.

      One of the other projects, I was very excited about was premiering a set of three Lewis Carroll pieces, that were written by a friend of mine who’s a composer here in Del Mar. They have been performed before, but this would have been the first time doing them with orchestra. I rarely get to perform brand new work with newly orchestrated pieces. So, I was really looking forward to that and finally dipping my toe into the more contemporary classical music realm. Also, I had a recital that I was scheduled to do with the Musical Merit Foundation here, as well. I won first place in their competition last year, and they often rehire their competition winners to do performances like that. I was very excited to be doing that with Bruce Stasyna, who is one of the conductors with San Diego Opera and who I adore. I was really excited to collaborate with him on that. So, losing out on all that stuff, it just... It felt like all of my momentum was going away. That’s something I’ve really been struggling with on a personal level.

      I’m really worried that after this is over, when we can finally get back to performing in public... I am really worried that because I didn’t already have an agent and wasn’t already the most established artist, that there won’t be a place for me. There was already a surplus of amazing singers and not enough work to go around. Now that’s going to be even more true, because of the companies that won’t be able to sustain remaining open. That’s been a huge hurdle.  

      I do feel very stagnant, in terms of my artistic growth as a soloist. It’s really hard for me to find motivation to practice, and I hate practicing at home. I live in an apartment. I have neighbors. It is small, and I feel like I’m going deaf. When I’m singing my own big repertoire the way it should be sung, it’s just unpleasant. So, if I find myself singing anything for my own soul food, enjoyment, and pleasure, it’s art songs for the most part right now.

TB: How does having these jobs cancelled or moved affect your financial health moving forward?