District choir students join hundreds of others online for Northwest Suburban Conference music festival
(02/05/2021) The Northwest Suburban Conference (NWSC) music festival, an annual event that typically brings hundreds of music students together each school year, looked a little different in 2021.
The NWSC music festival provides students the opportunity to pursue excellence in music performance, listen to music with understanding, and celebrate the artistic achievements of other student musicians.
Typically, the event includes the organization and performance of All-Conference ensembles including orchestra, band and choir. The concerts are reviewed and critiqued by a guest conductor or clinician. Students also have the opportunity to hear other performers and offer their own critiques of performances.
This year, however, a gathering of 600-plus students from 14 metro area high schools wasn’t an option so the event was in need of some restructuring. The choral program directors from the 14 high schools worked together and created a virtual event featuring master teacher and composer, Trey McLaughlin.
McLaughlin, from Augusta, Georgia, currently serves at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Augusta as the director of worship arts and also teaches as an adjunct faculty at the University of St. Thomas, teaching graduate level courses. He also continues his passion for writing and arranging music, teaching piano, and conducting classes in vocal technique.
With some students participating from home, others joined in-person for the first time since November for some socially-distanced music making.
“It has been three months since we’ve heard any collective music-making and 10 months since our concert choir was offered the opportunity to be together in one place,” said Amy Johnson, vocal music teacher at Coon Rapids High School. “After all of the hardship of this pandemic, having the opportunity to come together and make music in a shared place was really special.”
McLaughlin, joining in on the fun from Georgia, introduced participants to rote instruction, which is the teaching of music without the use of notes or printed lyrics. Students listened in to the instruction, and sang back their lines working on each part of the song, before bringing it all together at the end for a group performance.
“Our students had great feedback when talking about this experience a day later,” Johnson said. “Everyone loved singing with Trey and really appreciated his musicality, candor, and incredible performance ability.”
This day offered students an opportunity for some normalcy, in a year that has been anything but that.
“I feel honored that my colleagues across our conference agreed this event was worth participating in,” Johnson said. “It is not even close to the size and scope of the NWSC music festival, but it was some pretty sweet lemonade squeezed from the lemon of a year we have been handed.”
Watch a story about the event by KSTP Channel 5 News and view photos from CRHS.