This article was written by Avery Ryan who is a freshman in the Chronicle Club. This article was written in celebration of in-person learning returning.
It was 8:15 on a foggy Friday morning as U32’s strings players circled up for another rehearsal to start the day. Throughout the pandemic, the school’s music has been paused. Restraints on gatherings have caused the orchestral music to fall silent in the school building. Now resilient, they pull bows across strings to reinvent the melodies over one year later. The strings group is a small but mighty group of seven musicians. Hidden away in the music wing, they have been playing pieces from Mozart, Jazz and, even from Hamilton. The school has hit play on orchestral music in person at U-32!
Musicians in general have had a hard time throughout the pandemic. Concerts and rehearsals were cut to a minimum or relegated to Zoom. U-32’s music scene has had that same fate.
It is an amazing opportunity to have a music program at the school; an experience that perhaps was taken for granted before the pandemic put it on pause.
With rehearsals being regular every week, a performance is something to look forward to. The strings group had a concert on November 9th, it was a performance of the pieces Storm by Soon Hee Newbold, Mozart’s composition Ave Verum Corpus, and the song Dust in the Wind by Kerry Livgren. The strings group along with all the other music groups of U-32 had a great concert.
Here is a “preview” of what they worked on for the concert. This Kerry Livgren’s song Dust in the Wind:
