The Fine Arts part of school always seems to have their hands full with auditions of all kinds.  The choir students currently have their hands full with All-County choir.  Students who were accepted into All-County choir have already been notified, following their auditions which took place over a two week period.  Seniors Abby Firsching and Geovanni Rodriguez have already found out they will be a part of All-County choir and are anticipating this year’s All-County choir like they did last year.

“I’m looking forward to the different voices in the choir and how they’ll come together and make one big choir,” said Rodriguez.

This was Rodriguez’s sixth time auditioning for All-County choir and his fifth time making the cut.  The auditioning process is hard to describe in Rodriguez’s opinion because it is so different every year.

“Some years it’s challenging and other years it’s not.  It varies from year to year and it all depends on the piece of music we get,” said Rodriguez.

Firsching describes the audition process as daunting at first because she sees All-County choir as a gauge of how well she can read a piece of music and sing it, which is called sight reading and singing.  She expects there to be a lot of sight reading and singing at All-County choir because it is a choir that specializes in those two aspects.

“[Getting in] shows that you know how to sight sing and that you’re proficient in sight reading because that’s all you do at County.  I also expect some harder pieces than what we would normally do with our choirs at school because there is a selective group of people who are picked to go because they are proficient at sight reading,” said Firsching.

The actual audition entails going into choir director Ms. Fawn Phillips’s room and receiving a paper with four lines of music.  Phillips gives each student thirty seconds to read over and prepare the four lines.  Once the thirty seconds are up, the student is to sing the lines using solfege (do, re, mi, fa…) to the best of their ability.  Each line is worth eight points; four points for accuracy and one point for each measure the student sight sings correctly.  To qualify for All-County choir, a student must receive an 18/32.

Once the student is at All-County choir, they receive the music for the performance and are tasked with reading the music and sight singing it just as they did in the audition.  It is not a completely independent effort, however.

“The [voice] sections work together to figure out the music, but you have to put in your own effort to figure it out too,” said Firsching.