My College Years

10/20/16

   When it comes to school, nothing new happened. Honestly nothing. I played pool with my best friend, but that just happened to be at school. You pay 50 cents and you get to play a round of pool. I kicked her butt, but that's not important ;).

   Yesterday night was very special, I got to see my choir family again. The concert hadn't even started and I was tearing up seeing everybody again. I can't believe just how much I had missed everyone. The director does a 'Pass the Hat' at every concert, where you put in any change you may have. The proceeds go towards the choir program. Since I was in choir last year, when it was the director's first year (our old director retired), I knew just how much money the choir needs! Wardrobe (includes new dresses and/or cleaning of the dresses and robes), bus fees when we travel, music, and more. We had been pretty strapped for cash at the end of the year, so I wanted to help as much as I could. So I gave them $60. My mom freaked out, lol. She's like "I know it's your money, but $60??" YES $60. The new director has done so much to the program in just one year, and I know that there's so much more that will happen. Of all my years in choir, the last year was my favorite. And I can't believe my own damn bad luck that they got one of the best directors during my last year of high school. I even thought to myself: "Maybe I should fail my government or econ class so I have to stay back another year for choir".

   The last year of choir was the best year of my life. By far. We performed for the school at a few of our assemblies, we sang for the office ladies who LOVED us, and we went around to different classes around holiday time and caroled. We also went to a dinner party and caroled, we went and sang for my old middle school, and we performed at the Grotto down in Portland. All of our schools choirs also traveled to Salem and performed various holiday songs in the State Capitol Building. Look up "South Salem Silent Night" on YouTube and you can get an idea of one of the songs we performed there. Our chamber choir went to solo/ensemble and competed. Since our group is too big for all of us to sing mixed in the ensemble competition, we split up into two groups: the men and the women. The women placed first(!!) and if I remember correctly, the men got either first or second. So that meant we went on to state. At state, the women placed 4th out of 9 groups I believe, and the men placed 5th. Out of 5. It's not that they were bad, because they had improved greatly! It's just the other groups were CRAZY talented. To be honest, though, our guys should have placed 4th; there was a group that didn't do as well as ours.

   Everyone who's in the chamber choir is also in the Concert Choir. And about a month after solo/ensemble, it was regionals for Concert Choir. We performed a song in English, one in old French, one in Latin, and one in Arabic. We got kudos on the diversity of our songs, both in culture and in sound, and we placed 3rd!! Right behind two of the BEST choirs in our area. The choir who placed first is technically from a private school and shouldn't compete with us because every other choir is from a public school. The choir who placed second had 120 people!! And there is definitely power in numbers! So to place right behind them was such a confidence booster! State was another question. We all know that we performed our hearts out, and that we did our best. But everything seemed to be stacked up against us.

   We placed 26th out of 28th, if my memory is correct. How did we go from 3rd to second to last? Well, I'll tell you. There are 3 judges, and they are all supposed to be collegiate level. Only one of them was, the other two were a high school director and a middle school director. And the judges were supposed to be unbiased, and this results in relatively close scores, eg: 85, 82, 83. Well, one of the judges knew one of the choir directors, so their scores were skewed. They were something like: 82, 81, 96. And after the choirs perform, they go and they sight read some music. Our new director, and basically every other director, said that it was one of the hardest sight reading exercises ever. Our director said that in his 20+ years of being an adjudicator, he had never seen a sight reading exercise as hard as the one we were presented with.

   Despite the rigged judging system at state, it was still a great experience. The year before, we didn't even place at regionals. So from not placing to placing 3rd at regionals was such an experience.

   Attached is a video of Concert Choir performing "Skip to My Lou!".

- A