Month: April 2019

I am a soprano, so I get the melody of songs a lot. however, I most enjoy when I can sing high notes comfortably and when music flows smoothly. Throughout choir I learned many songs with various different genres and styles. Without further ado, here are some of my favorite songs I sang in choir in high school.

La Mia Stella (Ivo Antognini)

This song was inspired by the refugee crisis. It is one of my favorite choir songs because the lyrics handle the subject matter beautifully, and the song also flows really well and has great buildups.

 

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Junior Year

I enjoyed Women’s Chamber Choir more in junior than senior year because we had more people so we could do more complex songs, such as this one. I ended up having to jump between one soprano part to another to ensure that the parts were all balanced.

 

Baba Yetu

Freshman Year

People may have heard of this song as a video game theme, but I will always think of my first year in choir. I was frustrated with this song in the beginning because I could not figure out the right rhythm. After a lot of practice the rhythms were so much fun to sing, and it was so easy to get lost taking in the music.

Gloria

Junior Year

Every year concert choir sang a long piece that we did not have to memorize. The longest by far seemed to have been junior year, when it was quite literally almost 30 minutes long. Although my arms felt like they were going to fall off by the end of it, this one is still my favorite. I love the energy of each movement and the variation in tones, and how it repeats different themes. I enjoyed the most how the end tied to the beginning.

If you are pressed for time or do not want to sit for  a 30 minute video, I would recommend skipping to 23:50 after the first song.

 

Winter Wonderland (arr. Audrey Snyder)

This song holds a special place in my heart because the choir sings it every year at the end of the winter concert, The choir director, Doc always lets choir alumni join on stage to sing it with the rest of the choir. Over winter break I was able to go up as an alumni for the first time, and it was a lot of fun singing with the choir again.

12 Days of Christmas (Straight No Chasers)

Senior Year

I was very excited and a little surprised when one of my friends convinced our somewhat strict choir director to chose this parody of the 12 Days of Christmas to sing for the winter concert. The original  was performed by Straight No Chasers, a men’s a capella group and is absolutely hilarious, and we did our best to make it sound just as funny in a choir with 50 people. It was difficult to practice without laughing but that made it more fun.

Ave Verum Corpus

Senior Year

This song was another one of my favorites because of all the interesting chords. There were many difficult intervals to jump to in the song, but every single voice part had an interesting part, which is uncommon. It was such a great feeling whenever we got all of the chords right.

 

My favorite part about high school choir was putting on the spring show. In middle school, I would try out for musicals, but by high school I realized they weren’t right for me.  All I really wanted to do was sing songs while dancing, without having an absolutely ridiculous after-school schedule. The spring show gave me exactly that. The show would be based on a theme: Every other year is Broadway themed, and the other two years I was in choir we did Disney and Hollywood.

My favorite spring show was junior year (Hollywood theme) in large part because we got to sing several songs from Les Misérables. We had really neat choreography where we went off the stage, then went around the auditorium so we could re-enter in the back after soloists were finished. I enjoyed how well the choreography went with the tone of the musical in general, and it was really easy to get into the songs. It helped that I was already in love with “Do You Hear the People SingI also had a lot of fun singing and dancing to Into the Woods and Sister Act that year. The spring show tends to end up being almost 2.5 hours long, and that year people returning from college said they hadn’t realized how much time was passing, and it was the best spring show they’d been in or seen.

The most off-putting song I did with a choir was called A Wonderful Guy, from South Pacific, in sophomore year. I enjoyed doing cheesy choreography to go along with the cheesy lyrics. However, one line in the chorus was “I’m as corny as Kansas in August,” and no matter how hard well all tried to emphasize the K, nobody was ever able to hear it, which changes the meaning considerably.

One song I really enjoyed was Schuyler Sisters from Hamilton, which the concert choir sang senior year. T=he choreography was difficult for me, but so much fun to do once I got the hang of it. I also hadn’t listened to many Hamilton songs before, and other choirs doing a song as well, I was introduced to a few more songs, and decided to keep listening to more afterwards.

In general, choir could get frustrating, but was always rewarding. I am very glad I got as much involved in it as I did.