All City Choir

What do you think about when you think of singing? Do you think about the latest rock or pop craze? Or do you think about some opera singer on stage? For me, when I think about singing, I think about All City Choir.

All City Choir is a try-out choir made up of about 60 kids in grades four through eight who’ve come together to sing. We also have three awesome conductors Wendy Gee, Wendy Masciotra (or who we call Mrs. M), and Eva Bettger and we sing from September through April in our two seasons: Christmas Season and Spring Season.

In All City Choir, we also learn how to sing properly in many different ways. The first thing you learn is how to breath properly. We’re not allowed to breath like this (with your shoulders), but naturally like this (with your stomach). This is what my conductors call “tummy power”. One of the warm ups the choir conductors make us do are these huge sighs that start from the top of your voice and go down to the bottom of your voice to warm up our vocal chords and get us to breath properly.

Another technique we have to learn in choir practice is we learn now to pronounce vowels and consonants correctly. An example of that would be pronouncing out “D”s as light “T”s. We also have to keep our mouth round and you cannot smile while you’re singing or else it ruins the effect of the vowels. One thing we always always must do is to pronounce the consonants loudly. What our conductors always make us do to help us remember this is to say “We LoVe ouR CoNSoNaNTS!”.

The last, but probably one of the most important things we have to do when we sing, is to listen to each other and to sing with the mood of the music. If it is a soft song we are singing, then we can’t sing loudly in the piece, and if it is a song requiring a lot of energy, we have to be enthusiastic.

One piece we sang this year was called “Reflections of a Lad at Sea”. Our conductor for the last movement (Mrs. Gee) was always nagging us to add more energy into the song. The last movement was called “Ghost Ship” which was a story about a ghost ship a sailor had seen one night. It was a scary story so Mrs. Gee would demonstrate how we were supposed to sing by saying, “Now Listen! Well! As I tell a tale! Of a night that shook with fear!”. I think Mrs. Gee looked so ridiculous, that it made everyone remember how to sing the movement!

What makes All City Choir even more fun though is not just the singing, but the many activities and concerts we do together.

We