Aurora Voices is Burnside High School’s auditioned junior treble choir, led by conductor Ms Susan Densem.

Aurora Voices have had a thoroughly enjoyable year learning varied styles of repertoire in multiple different languages, have had numerous performance opportunities and have come together weekly as a group to make some beautiful choral music.

Whilst the senior choirs went abroad on their South Island Choral Tour earlier this year, Aurora Voices remained in Christchurch and focussed their time on enhancing their choral sound. The choir was fortunate enough to be able to work with many different choral conductors during this time who each helped the choir advance to new levels of technicality as well as establishing our tone quality, timbre, harmonious blend and visual performance.

Although there were no choral competitions for the choir to compete at during 2017 there was no shortage of performance opportunities for the junior choir. Some memorable performances include singing at the North West Festival where the members of Aurora Voices were seen as positive role models for the younger primary school singers, at Voices Festival where the choir got the chance to perform some of their more contemporary style works and at Burnsides main choral event Choral Extravaganza where the choir received adoring applause from the audience after performing their pieces ‘Billy and Mind do the Bebop Thing’ and ‘Strong’ to an impeccable standard.

This year was my first ever being the student leader/conductor of an ensemble at Burnside High School and throughout the year the members of Aurora Voices have been compassionate, understanding and a joy to conduct. I must extend my deepest thanks to our choir conductor Ms Densem who through her expertise and patience has helped make my first year as a conductor both successful and extremely enjoyable. Further thanks must be given to each and every member of Aurora Voices for making my last year within the music department at Burnside one to remember.

I have had the absolute pleasure of witnessing some of our schools most musically talented year 9 and 10 students develop their skills and embrace their musical creativity in Aurora Voices, I have thoroughly enjoyed being their student conductor for 2017 and wish them all the best for what the future holds for them at Burnside High.

Sophie Gilmore, Student Leader