The Highland Park choir presented its pre-UIL concert on March 25 at 7 p.m. in the Palmer Auditorium, performing pieces students had spent months preparing for their UIL competition.
“Our UIL competition is the main competition we have each year, and it showcases all the skills we’ve developed throughout the year, how they sing, the way they develop as a group,” choir director Neal Patel said. “This concert gives the students an opportunity to perform that music before we take it to competition and have judges hear us.”
The concert brought together choirs from across HPISD, spanning multiple grade levels and experience levels.
“This concert, we have the fourth and fifth honor choir coming, and then we have the sixth-grade middle school choir coming,” senior and choir officer Caroline Davidson said.
The songs performed at the concert were not chosen at random. Each piece will go on to be evaluated by judges at the UIL Choir competition in April.
“The songs that we sing in the pre-UIL concert are songs that we will take to contests, and so it’s different because in our other concerts we’re not using these songs to compete with,” Davidson said.
Unlike typical school concerts performed for family and friends, UIL choir competition will place students in front of a panel of judges who will score each choir on multiple criteria.
“So for the UIL concert, we go somewhere else to perform, and we have to sing in front of some judges and, you know, they grade us on our musicality and our overall sound together. It’s cool to get to perform in front of other people, not just our parents and friends,” said senior and choir officer Jarren Pierce.
Before a piece reaches that polished level, students work through an often uncertain process of learning music they had never heard performed as a full group. This exercise is called sightreading.
“When you first start a piece, it can be a little bit scary because it hasn’t all come together yet and you can’t really see what the big picture looks like,” Pierce said.
Once all the individual parts have locked into place, the result makes the long process worthwhile.
“One of my favorite parts is being with my friends, and everyone has a different part of music they’re learning, so when we all come together and sing something, all in different parts, but it comes together so beautifully,” Pierce said.
The choir program offers students something that goes beyond the rehearsal room and the stage.
“I don’t think people realize the amount of team building, the amount of bonding… that this ia family outside of their own family,” Patel said.
