Are there any current or previous show choir members on here? Share your experiences. I was a 4-year member of my high school show choir (the only freshman my first year). We went to show choir competitions in Mississippi my sophomore and junior years. We had about 32 members those years and about 25 my freshman and senior years. It was probably the most fun I had ever had in school and is the reason that I am passionate about music. I'm hoping to one day teach vocal music at a high school and grow my own show choir program!
i was in my school chorus from 6-8th grade. nothin special- couldn't sing that well, never got a solo. i just thought that they sounded like angels, and i love music. i passed through it by lip-synching a lor
I did it from 7th grade through first semester of 12th grade. Not all the same choir, obviously. 7th and 8th was the middle school show choir, 9th was the freshman show choir, 10th was the junior varsity show choir (I couldn't do varsity because of scheduling D, and 11th and 12th was varsity show choir. My middle school teacher was awesome (she was the choir teacher for the whole program) and she's one of the big reasons I'm a music major today. Freshman teacher was horrible. He just didn't know what he was doing. JV show choir (which wasn't actually even show choir the whole year) was taught by the freshman teacher and the varsity teacher together, and the varsity teacher was one of the highlights of high school for me. She was so great. My junior year was probably the best our show choir has ever been. Our vocals were okay, but we always did crazy awesome harmony and choreography that reflected our identity as a city school, and we were never afraid to move far away from the packaged plastic happy happy show choir crap that a lot of schools do (no offense if that's what you love... that stuff is just not enjoyable to me at all). I guess I mean we had a kind of wild, soulful character that most good show choirs don't have. Then that teacher left after my junior year and we got this awful new guy my senior year (not just saying that because he was new and I missed the old one - he was actually terrible). He changed most of our favorite things and got rid of a lot of long-standing traditions. I tried hard to like him, but I just couldn't do it. He also taught chamber choir, which meant I was getting two hours of him in a row every day, so I ended up dropping show choir at semester, since concert music is much more my thing. That turned out to be the best decision I made that year, because I also had to switch into different AP Lit and AP Macroecon classes to make it work, and those were two of my favorite classes in high school. So show choir was always sort of a thing I did, but what I think of as a great show choir is not the same as what most people think of. One of my college friends was in one of "those" show choirs in high school and every once in a while she'll talk about a song being perfect for a humor piece or a character piece. That just doesn't equate with me. That kind of thing just is not funny to me, it's painfully awkward. I need my show choirs to be about dance and harmonies, not pizzazz or whatever... My favorite song we did in show choir was Let's Dance (video - this is not us, but ours was kind of similar). We also did this freaking awesome mash-up of Mercy and Respect.
Cool! We are doing my orechestral arrangement of Mercy in the school chamber orchestra! My primary school had a choir, and I LOVED singing in it, bt I haven't sng in a good few years since (except in my woeful aural tests). Our new music teacher is starting achoir after summer, as well as staging "The Wizard of Oz." I Can't wait.
@steel03 Ahhh You are from the Midwest. Midwest show choir is ahmazing. I kind of had a similar situation at my school. Our really awesome director left after my Junior year and we got this awful young lady that knew nothing. I was basically teaching the class because she literally did not know what she was doing. But yes, how I understand it. There are two different forms of high school show choir: competition style--where its all about visual vocal perfection and doing shows according to a specific structure that judges look for. and local/entertainment style--where everything is to put on a good show with fun choreography and 'easy' vocal parts that do their job. Ours was more like the 2nd during the fall and late spring, and more like the 1st during competition season. Like we hired professional choreographers, created massive sets and backgrounds, got some pretty expensive costumes, and had critiques from some of the best directors of the area. It really was a community effort. But then in the spring we put on this massive show with lots of solos and small group singings and a few group numbers, which was more about the fun. I love show choir. haha
Yeah, we did the same kind of thing, but with a LOT less money, because we're a city school with no funding. We used a professional choreographer, but I believe we got him really cheap or free because he was a young alum and good friends with our director. We never did sets and backgrounds, though, we focused more on making the show exciting. Our costumes were not super expensive, but we did exclusively do onstage costume changes until the new teacher came, so I feel like that made up for it. My junior year, we did Ain't Nothing Wrong With That right after the ballad and we got to rip the dresses off and then rip off our zipper ties, then right after that was Let's Dance, and we got to rip our outer shirts off. Lots of ripping. And then spring semester we did a big show choir show with all the show choirs and solos and small groups and senior recognition and a slide show and a CHEESY rendition of I Sing the Body Electric from Fame and it was 95% student-run and created, so it was way too long and never well done and lots of people came, hahaha. But then Mr. New Guy came in and got rid of that long-standing tradition. He also choreographed everything himself. I mean it's fine if you want to change that stuff, but at least wait a couple years! Ugh it was awful. He actually got laid off because of downsizing and budget cuts, but they ended up replacing her. Seems like it's a little better now, but I don't think we'll be the force we used to be for a while. I so, so, SO feel your pain about your senior year teacher. My junior year actually, before we got the new teacher, I had an awful teacher for chamber choir who put way too much stock in me and I ended up being the auxiliary every time he left the room.
Cheesy=good! Haha. But one thing I was always looking for was to restore the program to its former glory. Back in the 80s and 90s, the show choir had a string of legendary directors, and they went to competitions and festivals, bringing home trophies, etc. The closest we got was in my Jr. year. Yeah senior year was just a FLOP. She would yell at the top of her lungs, get into arguments with kids in front of the class, storm out of the room, once she grabbed a student and pushed her into her chair. It was baddddd. Like I was called to talk to our principal about what happened. I had hope.... but she smashed those dreams real quick. I guess that goes with inexperience and age. But all of that really has inspired me to go into Music Education and create a successful program, and what better way than having experienced all of the problems. And we weren't funded either. at all. not a single penny. I believe we had to pay something like $500 each. And then do a whole bunch of fundraising... It was crazy.
Oh god, $500 is too much. I think it was $100 across the board for us, or maybe $120 or so for the dresses. Our famous story is from my junior year, when we competed at Gretna, Nebraska. First of all, we didn't make finals, which was ridiculous because two of the judges ranked us 2nd and 3rd out of everyone and the third ranked us 12th. Obviously something is wrong there. But then we went back for our critique, and the critique judge was like blatantly racist. He said all the white people should dance like the black people on one song and all the black people should dance like the white people on another song. And then he asked who our "best white female dancer" was and had her walk in rhythm to prove that even the best kind of dancer couldn't make it look good. The whole time, our teacher was sitting in the corner about to explode, and the next day she told us she'd never been more mad in her life. So that's part one. The next year, we got this new teacher, right, and he's crashing and burning. Halfway through the year, he decided to require us to come to two mandatory 10-hour rehearsals in one weekend led by an outside clinician. And yeah, it was the same guy. At the beginning, he told a kid that "there is a glass butterfly in my heart, and you just crushed it" (I'm not kidding, he said "glass butterfly" out loud in public). Then later, he said we should be very proud of our department because one of our teachers is "a black" and one of them is "a white" and they work so well together. And then, finally, he told us he grew up in a very racist household, but then he sang the black national anthem and now he loves blacks. It was so obvious that he assumed we thought we needed reassurance or special help because we have diversity that a lot of successful midwest show choirs don't have. Oh my god we were real pissed.
