The Sandie Choirs led by Carolyn Terrell and Larissa Cunningham have prepared for the past month to perform at the Fall Concert on Oct. 2.
New Sound is the top Sandie Choir and consists of students the choir teachers deemed the best. New Sound sang “Sir Duke” by Paul Langford, “Catch a Falling Star” by Peter Sicotte and an all time favorite, “Take on Me” by Roger Emerson. This was their first concert and they had a good start for the year ahead of them.
“Depending on a song’s difficulty, it could take anywhere from three days to three weeks to learn it, and an extra week to fully memorize it, as we perform almost all of our pieces completely memorized.” Hayln Derington, senior and New Sound member said.
Both Terrell and Cunningham put a lot of effort into choosing music that will challenge students in a positive way.
“I really start thinking about it way ahead of time, I mean months and months because I think about who’s going to be in the choir, what their abilities are and where I want them to be,” Terrell said. “I pick music at a level that will challenge them appropriately but I want to set them on a path that leads them to where I want them to be at the end of the year so the music is increasing in hardness and difficulty so the concert is not as difficult.”
The choir teachers will spend the next few months working with the students to prepare them for the upcoming Christmas Concert.
“We need to work on our new songs that we are getting for Christmas,” Terrell said. “We also need to work on our tone, we need to work on our vocal technique and we need to work on our music reading so we are going to start practicing our sight reading a lot more starting next week.”