🎶 Vocal Music 🎶 Winter Update

I hope you all had a lovely holiday season and end to 2025. We are excited to hit the ground running here in the music department, with a lively schedule of upcoming concerts, festivals and shows!

Seventh and Eighth graders in Vocal Music and Select Choir will be performing in their grade-level winter concerts in January, and Eighth graders and Select Choir will be traveling to Indian Hills High School for the FLOW Festival Field trip in February. Sixth Graders have just completed their Winter Informances and have switched vocal parts! They will be adjusting to their new assignments and learning music for their concert in the spring.

And...Select Choir and Jazz Band will be performing at a Devils game in March - we invite anyone who would like to come and hear them!

More group-specific info can be found below!

Similar to sports, chorus is a group activity. The goal is to work together as a team, where everyone contributes to the whole. Therefore, like a sports team, we want to present a unified front! While we don't have uniforms per se, we have a dress code to create that same effect, while allowing for a bit of student choice. The guidelines can be found in the Music Handbook you signed at the beginning of the year, but I've outlined them below as well!

TOPS

All students must wear a sleeved, dressy white shirt that tucks in or meets at the waist. They have options for long/short sleeves and ties/jewlery. Sweaters are not recommended, since the students are standing close together in a tight group under hot lights in a crowded auditorium.

BOTTOMS

All students must wear black dress pants. A standard black pair of khakis works well for guys. Girls can wear dress pants or black leggings that flare out at the bottom. (Regular leggings are too casual.)

SHOES

Black dress shoes/flats are the goal!

An evening concert is a formal event, something that we have fewer and fewer of in our modern world. We encourage them to lean into this and wear something more dressed up than their everyday, since we don't perform in front of an audience everyday!

🎶 Parent tip - if you buy a bit bigger and short-sleeved in the winter, you are covered for the spring! Even though the seasons are different, the outfit is the same and the temperature in the Multipurpose Room is consistently on the warm side. 🎶

As the world prepares to watch the Winter Games in Milan, the vocal music students will be having games of their own! All grades will compete in class-specific Vocalympics during classtime. Students in each section (Part 1, Part 2 and in seventh and eighth grade, Part 3) work to create their own country name and national anthem, and then compete against each other in music-based games designed to make them stronger musicians and sections! The members of the winning "country" get a Magic Eraser - a chance to take a notes quiz, listening quiz or TIEE rehearsal grade up to 100%! Along the way, students learn about collaboration, music notation and do a deep dive into national anthems - which will help us have more in-depth conversations about the music we will be studying in the spring to celebrate our own country's 250th anniversary!

Select Choir is back to our regular Wednesday 3-4pm rehearsals, and we have a lot to prepare for! Our group is going to be featured at the Eighth Grade Winter Concert January 14th, at the FLOW festival February 11th, and at a New Jersey Devils Game at the Prudential Center on March 16th! Singers will be sent home with physical forms for the FLOW Festival and Devils performances. Use the purple button bars below to click on forms to fill out and order tickets!

I will keep our Select Choir Calendar spreadsheet updated with dates of rehearsals, performances and links to permission slips as well. Feel free to bookmark it!

The sixth grade may not be performing until the spring, but preparations are already underway! All sixth graders switched the parts they are singing (we divide into two sections - Part 1 and Part 2) and have started to learn their big showpiece medley - Disney Dazzle! They will start a regular rotation of Monday TIEE rehearsals to sing with students from the other sixth grade vocal classes who are on the same part. These rehearsals expedite learning, improve confidence, and are a fun chance to work with fellow singers they don't regularly see. We will also be starting a patriotic piece to celebrate the country's 250th anniversary. Students are excited and working hard!

We just had our first read through for the show on January 6th, and it was a blast! The show promises to be a wonderful production with all the talent we had in that room. Students are excited and there was a real sense of camaraderie at that first rehearsal, which is just as important as the show itself! If you have a student in the production and wanted a quick link to the rehearsal calendar - here it is! We try to stick to the schedule as much as possible, but there are always changes as the school year evolves. Feel free to bookmark the link for handy reference, which will be updated regularly. Shows are March 26th and 27th and tickets are cash at the door only. Hope to see you all there - no doubt it will be one for the history books!