Varsity for Choir?

In the past week we did our auditions for both choir and show choir. They were much less stressful for me than usual because I was already in the top show choir last year but there were many surprises in this year's cycle. The director at our school has decided not to do things the same as usual. The regular choir is going to be mu ch different. in the past, you were required to be in concert choir if you were in the top show choir. now you don't have to and might not get to because he is changing the number of people in the choirs. There were 160 people auditioning for concert choir and only half of them will make it. that is a huge difference from what it use to be where everyone got in if they were good enough or had time to do it. He is also cutting the Chamber choir, which is the group above concert choir, in half as well. this means it will be closer to the size of our 12 person jazz group. This is causing trouble, though, because the people auditioning are doing two things: they are getting better and there are more of them. that is where my question comes in. For the first time, we my actually have a varsity choir.

We have always had the varsity show choir, Happiness inc., at my school and that is because we always have tons of people audition for the 48 spots in the group. This year was actually worse than before. there were even large amounts of freshman that could have beaten some of the sophomores and juniors. It means that we will have a great pool of kids to choose from but sadly we will have to leave some out of groups even if they are good enough to be in them.

That has never happened in choir however. until this year. we have always had a big enough choir that it didn't matter if we had a lot of people audition. But now we have reduced the number of people in the groups, added a varsity letter to earn, and there were more people than ever who auditioned. So, here we are at a crossroad. This will surely help both concert choir and the lower choir where the rest of the people who don't make it will be placed but it won't make people happy. People who are great and have been in some of these groups already will be removed because the competition is so tough.

So I will compare it to this. People who try their best will not make groups they are deserving of. So their effort doesn't even matter