For the second year in a row, Hamburg’s elite choral group, Aerial Boundaries, has traveled to Kutztown University to participate in the High School Choral Festival.
This is the second annual Choral Fest lead by Dr. Hank Alviani, the associate professor of music, and involves a handful of schools from nearby areas. These schools perform some of their songs for each other and Dr. Alviani, then receive feedback from their audience and a few minutes of training with Dr. Alviani himself. This year, there were three other schools performing with Hamburg: Delaware Valley, Whitehall, and Williams Valley.
After performing and being critiqued at KU, Aerial Boundaries has begun to improve their songs. The first problem the group had been having was their phrasing. When they would sing certain lines of the song, the group would take a breath at the same time in a place they should not be breathing in, therefore causing the line to sound different than what it was intended to be. The way each piece of music was sung was tweaked to add nuance, which makes the less interesting sections of the music more pleasing to the ear.
The only other problem Aerial Boundaries had was their balance. In important sections of the songs, the men would overpower the women. Though having strong male vocals is important, this was causing the song to lose quality. This problem was fixed with a change of the setup of Aerial Boundaries, so now both female sections stand next to each other when performing.
Each time they participated in the KU Choral Fest, Aerial Boundaries has been able to learn from the experience. Hopefully, this will become an annual tradition that will help Hamburg’s choral program to continuously improve.
For more information on Kutztown University and its events, go to: http://www.kutztown.edu/news-and-media/news-releases/october-2015/.
Annie Crider is a senior at Hamburg High School.