"It's a rare honor," says Daniel Guiterrez, choir director at Reed Academy. "
We were just very humbled and surprised. There are amazing choirs in the state, and it is a huge honor to have both choirs selected."
Reed Academy has two choirs: the Reed Academy Singers, featuring seventh- and eighth-grade students, and the Reed Academy Sixth-Grade Select Singers. In total, 73 students from Reed will perform at the conference in two separate programs. Guiterrez and another Reed vocal music teacher, Taylor Schaeffer, submitted pieces for consideration last spring and were notified of their selection in July. Practices for the performance began on the first day of school.
"The pieces we're performing are both appropriate but very challenging," Guiterrez says. "Taylor's pieces for the sixth-graders, they're both very complicated pieces of music -- way beyond what typical elementary students would be able to sing, like Native American music, African music and beyond. World music is utilized in a lot of ways. With my students, we're doing two world premieres of music specifically written for the Reed Academy Singers."
Two years ago, Guiterrez posted a performance of Reed Academy Singers performing a piece by Richard Ewer
on Youtube. Ewer reached out and contacted Guiterrez, praising the choir for their work and offering to write a piece for Reed Academy to perform at the 2015 MMEA conference. When Ewer found out that Reed had been selected again, he was commissioned to write a piece just for Reed. A fellow composer Ryan Main also was commissioned to write a piece for the Reed Academy Singers.
"For Reed, it's great for the kids to see that working hard on something does have its benefits and pay off in the long run," said Dr. Debbie Grega, principal at Reed Academy. "But I think it's extra satisfying that the students who work so hard on this music every day, that their work is being appreciated by people who do this as a living. But to go and sing very challenging music to people who would know if you mess up, it's an extra degree of both difficulty and accomplishment to being selected."
The consistent recognition of Reed's excellent vocal music program in combination with support from Reed's community have helped it grow. Nearly 50 percent of students at Reed are involved in the vocal music program. But for Guiterrrez, the vocal music program is always more than the music they sing.
"The performance is not what makes the program the program," he says. "I worry about students knowing how to be disciplined and doing things welll. So when we stand, we stand excellently and silently because everything we do is excellent. I worry about students being able to listen to each other and respect each other. If students listen to each other, they'll be more interested in the sound of the whole choir than the sound of their own voice. I focus on how to make better people, and the product of making better people and also making better learners is a really good choir."
News From Springfield Public Schools