The Logan Park High School Choir continues to blossom year after year; 2018 being no exception.

A year filled with performances and awards have allowed our choir to evolve to new heights, showing once again that the Logan Park’s music department is a force to be reckoned with.

We began with the yearly tradition of our school music camp (camp Tirohanga) where the choir, jazz band and orchestra came together for a fun weekend of collaborative music making. Music camp is always a great way to form a connection with all new choir members and to start looking at our repertoire chosen by all members of the choir and of course our wonderful teacher and conductor Ms Hana Fahy. The annual music camp is a highlight for any music student not only because it’s three days of getting to sing or play your favourite instruments but because of the special relationships and unity formed within the choir, jazz band and orchestra - oh and of course the music concert on our last night!

Once returning back to school, we as a choir chose unanimously to craft and perfect “Happy Together” by The Turtles for our contemporary piece, “Tihore mai “ for our New Zealand composition piece and “Alle Psallite” for our classical piece. We then had three months of practices in order to get these songs up to scratch before the regional Big Sing competition held in early June. As a small choir the Big Sing competition is an event that we strive to do well in year after year however it continues to be quite intimidating as we are performing in front of 20 other amazing school choirs (over 10,000 students!) from around the Otago region. Nonetheless, it allows our small choir to be pushed outside our comfort zone and gives us another opportunity to perform and to show off how great our choir is to the greater public. The LPHS choir had started to become accustomed to leaving the competition with only a participation certificate year after year; however, we left a lasting impression with our NZ composition piece and won the overall trophy for our waiata! This is a highly prestigious award and one that we all feel so proud in receiving.

Since the Big Sing we have performed for the school on multiple occasions including being a part of the Youth Concert for a 40 hour famine fundraiser, an excellent opportunity run by the charities club to raise money for an incredible cause. We have also worked closely alongside the orchestra and the new chamber choir in order to prepare for our tour across Dunedin, which took place during the end of last term. This was a fantastic and new experience for us as a choir being able to perform 5 pieces at George Street Normal, The Public Art Gallery and Dunedin North Intermediate. Our goal for next year is to have more workshops with the DNI school choir to further explore choral techniques and to interact with future students of LPHS.

We have had the joy of starting up our new chamber choir run by the very talented Susan Scharpf, an experienced choral singer who has generously given up her time to craft and train a small number of talented singers every Monday. The objective of our chamber choir is for students who wish to develop their understanding of difficult choral arrangements and to learn more vocal technique. It has been amazing to watch them shine this year and I am sure we all look forward to next year as we are able to listen to their beautiful sound.

To finish off the year we are in the process of working on our very last piece for the senior prize-giving in early November. This is a fantastic way for our school and our families to enjoy and celebrate our incredible school choir, and witness all of the hard work that we have put in all year. It has been an extremely rewarding year for our school choir and a wonderful experience working alongside our amazing teacher and conductor Hana Fahy. The school choir and chamber choir are two groups that I would recommend anyone to join to further explore your passion of singing or to learn more technical vocal skills but all in all are simply fun to be a part of! I look forward to seeing both choir groups next year as they continue to impress the masses!