The choir program here at Northview has had success over the years. This year is no exception.
Women Chorus, Varsity Voices, and Concert Choir attended their district choral festival in February, where they hoped to accomplish top scores. For their performance, they received top scores. This allowed all of them to qualify for the state festival on May 9, although only Varsity Voices will be attending.
“All three choirs qualified [for the state festival] this year but because it’s the day before our Pops concert there is quite a lot on our plate at once and Varsity [Voices] is kind of used to that,” music director Jack Phillipson said.
There are two components of what happens at festival, singing rehearsed songs and sight reading unfamiliar music. At their district festival, the choirs performed two songs, before reading music to a judge. At the state choral festival, they add one song to their list and sightread.
“We will find a piece of music that we’ve never seen before, me or the singers, we go open it up and have to go through the steps that they give us to sing it for the judge, kind of the most nerve wracking part,” Phillipson said.
The singers in choir are delighted about their success at the district festival. Senior and varsity singer Elaina Shafer, a choir student since her freshman year, shared her thoughts.
“I thought it was really cool that concert choir did as well as they did at festival considering that was their first year going to festival,” Shafer said.
At the state choir festival, Varsity Voices has time to warm up before they perform their songs. They will sing three songs: Through The Dark, Sing Me to Heaven, and a French piece titled Dirait-On to the judges to be scored.
“We’ll warm up and then walk straight onto the stage for the performance aspect of it. That’s where we do our three songs,” Phillipson said.
With everything going on right now, Phillipson and his students are very excited to go to the state festival. Despite the challenges from Covid and a decrease of members, they feel the choirs have talent.
“Even though varsity is smaller because we didn’t have as many people involved in the program and objectively less experienced and younger, we found a way to take the voices that we had and create one of the best Varsity sounds that we’ve had in my time here,” Phillipson said.
