Every year, a small group of students from Singers get to travel to Lee University to audition for the All-East Honor Choir. They go from practicing for their concerts in class to having to learn audition music quickly and spend the weekend rehearsing. Students learn how to adapt to pressure, and their teamwork shines like never before. A few students who attended this trip, Elijah Smith (11), Kylie Seay (11), and Elijah Clift (12), explained what they learned and how All East was motivational. Seay talks about her experience interacting with all the other high schools that auditioned.
“I loved talking to kids from other schools about how their choir did things and how some schools prioritize the choir a lot more than community. I was surprised to see how some kids weren’t even friends with the other people in choir, and they just treated it as a class, while our school prioritizes community a lot more, and we are all so close,” Seay said.
Students in Singers are renowned for their ability to have such close relationships and work together so well. It is noteworthy that Seay recognized how special the connection between LCHS students is compared to other schools because the community built in Singers and Chorus classes is everlasting. Seay also describes what they got to do in between rehearsals and how it made the weekend even more memorable.
“We had rehearsal and got to spend a lot of time with our LC choir people, and had to rehearse for a couple days. We got really close with the people we roomed with or the people in our group, specifically (like Men’s or Women’s choir or Singers), because we spent so much time with them. The times outside of rehearsal, we had a lot of fun. We went to see Wicked, had dinner, breakfast, and lunch together, hung out at the hotel, and it brought us all a lot closer,” Seay said.
Smith mentions how intimidating the fast learning pace was before and during their auditions.
“We had to teach ourselves like six pages of music pretty quickly before we got there. It was stressful to learn the music that fast, but it was worth it,” Smith said.
An inspirational event like these auditions, where one gets to meet all different kinds of students in the musical community, is something that they will never forget. They sang together and learned together, which brought them closer as a team and a family. Clift describes how he dealt with the stress from the event, but how it ended up benefitting him as well.
“There is a lot of excitement every year because we get to be a part of something so different from LC and see how all the different schools learn with us. We learned a lot of things to take back with us because all the high schools learn and interact differently. It was pretty high stress because of how fast we had to learn the music, but all the support from my friends and the audience made it all worth it,” Clift said.
Each student who gets a chance to go perform for All East walks away with powerful lessons learned and a shared reflection with their classmates about the bonding experiences they had. The most important purpose of these auditions might not be whether or not the student gets accepted or not, but the sense of purpose that it instilled in those with musical interests. The last point that Clift made was about how he was inspired to work harder for his future and career.
“[All East] is definitely a source of inspiration for me to be more tedious and to pay attention to the details. I want to go into audio engineering, and being in that kind of group helps train my brain to notice smaller and different details and exposes me to different schools’ methods to help me learn overall,” Clift said.
