All States and Results

The All State festival was tons of fun! The conference took place in the World Trade Center in Boston, the back of which looks out over the Charles River. On Wednesday, we arrived at noon and got our stuff to our respective hotel rooms. The girls from Gordon got to stay in an amazing hotel, which had Reese's Peanut Butter Cups in a bowl at the front desk. There were puffy white down comforters, a nice view, and cool decorations in the room, and the hotel overall was pretty spectacular. Once we settled in with all our stuff, we left the hotel and went back to the World Trade Center, where we sat in some meetings that included a class-like lecture on professionalism, and a collegiate clinic with the Keynote speaker, Chris Azzara. He was phenomenal! He taught us all about the basics of improvisation and how it is a key element of music that is missing from almost every music curriculum. It was in this clinic that we were introduced to the song "Mama Nia," an improvised song by his five-year-old daughter that might one day become some sort of folk song. Little did we know that we would hear that song far more often than we could ever have conceived. Once our meetings were over for the day, we set up to prepare for the arrival of everyone else (almost all Massachusetts music teachers and about 600 students) the following morning. We moved risers for the chorus, and then two of us were assigned to the task of organizing ALL the student name tags alphabetically and then alphabetically by ensemble. That by itself took us three hours, with additional help when we realized it was going to take forever if more people weren't involved. Finally, before bed, five of us went out to the Cheesecake Factory, which, in retrospect, probably wasn't a good idea seeing as it limited the number of hours of sleep I got from six to four.

Thursday marked the beginning of the conference for real. Our alarms went off at five, and after that we did everything from helping at the registration table to moving equipment to making announcements in clinics to doing everything else. Friday was pretty similar, and then Saturday was concert day. We moved the equipment to Symphony Hall on Friday night. Side note: chorus risers are extraordinarily heavy, and they're somewhat awkward to carry. Moving them is not very fun. The concert in Symphony Hall lasted for ::gasp:: THREE HOURS, because all four groups performed full programs. Then we moved the equipment back on to trucks, and finally made it back to Gordon by seven that evening. It was a long three days, but it was lots of fun.

The highlight of the entire conference by far was the opportunity to see a good friend (and the chorus accompanist) conduct his own arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner with the chorus at Symphony Hall. The arrangement was absolutely fantastic, the students and the audience loved it, and the cheering squad of several Gordon students backstage was thrilled to be able to witness his accomplishment.

Overall, the conference was a great success, although it resulted in me catching a fairly nasty cold. And, according to the person I undoubtedly caught it from, it lasts longer than the average cold seeing as he is still sick, and has been for almost a week. Yay. So I think this picture pretty much sums up the All State conference for me...