All-Northwest is a high-level choir that gives high school students from across the state the opportunity to prepare, audition, and expand their musical abilities through working with different voices and directors.
Wyoming students who made this prestigious group work hard to sharpen their voices through concerts and performance opportunities that the group offers them.
This year, nine Powell High School students were accepted into this group: sophomore Kaylee Harris, junior Austin Sears, and seniors Levi Hawley, Lane Coble, Deeanna Gibson, Geo Dilworth, Natalie Black, Norah Startin and Justin Dusenberry.
Throughout the week of March 4-7, these musicians were provided the opportunity to share their love for choir at the Northwestern ACDA Choral Conference in Tacoma, WA. This gave participants new ways to learn about their voice and how to improve it.
“I learned a lot, especially since this is my first time doing any vocal honour group,” Sears said. “I was a little behind on terminology and stuff people already knew by heart. So it was a little bit overwhelming, but I definitely learned a lot, and I improved significantly over the time we rehearsed.”
The conference allowed attendees to receive feedback on their voices while also finding ways to improve with the people around them.
“I always find so many ways to improve my voice during these events,” Hawley said. “I’m always reminded of a lot of the basics that I tend to overlook; there’s always little techniques that every director has that’s slightly different from the next, but if you’re able to put those together, that’s the true key to success with singing.”
During this conference, the directors gave the group techniques to work on to make their voices stronger.
“Our director really focused on movement while you’re singing,” Startin said. “We would do warm-ups, we would toss a ball around in our hands, and it would get us moving, and before every rehearsal, we would stretch to make sure everything is stretched. And I thought that was definitely interesting.”
This choral group sang up to seven songs on this trip. One of the songs they sang was called “Star of the County Down.” This specific song was world-premiered and written for this specific choir group.
“We were the first ever group to perform it in front of an audience,” Dusenberry said. “And so that recording of us is going to get posted on JW Pepper, which is really a cool thing.”
This program allowed students to collaborate with vocal musicians outside of PHS choir, testing their adaptability as singers.
“It was really nice to work with so many different people because after a while of singing with the same people, you know what to expect from them,” Gibson said. “But with these new people, they surprised me every time we would practice. I’d like to think I improved because we were also with a completely different director, so we got to learn a lot of new things from him.”
This was Kaylee Harris’s first year making All-Northwest, and she thought this was an opportunity she would always remember.
“It was a very big choir, but we all sounded amazing,” Harris said. “The concert at their theatre is an experience I will never forget.”