More Captivating Information about High School Choirs

You know who you are. You are the survivor of high school spring music programs.

Yes, either you played in them, or you went to them as a parent, or both. A pleasant experience? Speaking only for myself, no and no! Hated playing in them, and hated listening to them.

When my daughter The Spare walked across the stage and grabbed her high school diploma, I thought to myself, "Ahhhh.... no more spring music concerts!"

For those of you not in the know, most high schools combine all their musical acts (band, orchestra, choir, and dance) into one springtime program. It's uniformly long and mostly excruciating, except for the singing. It's easier for voices to hold a proper note than instruments. I've never heard a single high school orchestra, most notably the one I performed in, that could produce anything that remotely sounded like pleasant sound.

Last night I went to a spring music concert at Boniface VIII High School on behalf of my exchange student, whose mama is halfway around the globe. This concert reminded me painfully of the parental obligation of attending high school performances. But I stuck it heroically. If you read yesterday's post, you'll know I had an agenda.

I wanted to see if a parochial school larded its spring music concert with religious music, which was a given at Snobville Public High School.

Turns out, the parochial school musical fare was, with one exception ("Come On, Get Happy," a show tune), resolutely secular. Not a single syllable of Latin. My student, Extra Chair, was completely correct.

So after the painful ordeal evening concert, E.C. and I unwound over a sandwich at the local diner (her first diner visit ever). She explained why the spring musical program had no religious music in it.

Silly me. The Boniface VIII choir sings at Mass once a week! So of course they blow all the Latin into those entertainments. Actually, however, E.C. says they don't sing any Latin. It's all English or Spanish. No matter the native tongue, the religious music goes into the religious venue, and the pop music get spread upon the parents, teachers, and siblings.

The moral of this sermon is, if you have to keep going to high school spring musical concerts, it's always nice to learn something new about them. Clarinet, please give me a B-flat ... on key.