“Excellent” does not come easily, but for chorus students excellence is expected.
Ramona Jenner took chorus students to the N.C. Music Performance Adjudication, and she was pleased with how students performed.
“We performed grade six music, which is the hardest music to perform. Not a lot of high schools perform grade six music, so I am very pleased with how we handled this task,” Jenner said.
The purpose of the NC MPA according to The N.C. Music Association is to provide each performing group with an opportunity to improve and to evaluate its performance.
“We received four scores: two excellent ratings and two superior ratings. We received an “Excellent” rating on our overall performance,” Jenner said.
While Jenner was pleased with how the group performed, some chorus students had higher hopes for the performance and were left unsatisfied.
“We could have gotten a superior rating that day. I think MPA is just a snapshot of your abilities, and we weren’t able to perform how we wanted to perform,” senior Mason Wilkinson said.
Wilkinson said he knows that the group is capable of much more than what they showed at MPA, and he was left unsatisfied because the group fell short.
“It’s okay though because the way I see it, is if you’re ever satisfied as a musician, then you’re not going to be very good. I think everyone feels the same way, so now we’ll be able to learn and improve,” Wilkinson said.
Senior Denise Sherow also had thoughts on why the group may not have achieved all it could.
“I had a lot of faith in our choir to do well in our performance, but I did worry for the sake of accuracy and musicality because of everyone’s nerves,” Sherow said.
Low attendance also led to the class feeling slightly unprepared

.
“There were only a few days during the semester that everybody was present, and I think this affected us a lot. It doesn’t seem like missing one or two people would be a lot, but when anyone isn’t there, it is hard to compensate for that missing voice,” Wilkinson said.
Wilkinson said that despite feeling like the group didn’t accomplish what they could have, he will miss this group more than anything else.
“Chorus is probably one of the only things that kept me at this school. I’ll miss the class as a whole because we’ve all been together for so long,” Wilkinson said. “It’s like leaving my family.”