CHS freshman choir Counterpoints continues to prepare for its auditions, which are scheduled to be between Feb. 4 and March 7. The auditions determine choir placement for next year. All three of the choir directors are prepared to help students select songs and perfect performance techniques for the auditions, according to choir director Ann Conrad.

“We’re happy to help students. If they have a piece of music and ask us, ‘Too long or too short?’ we’re happy to look at it and tell them yeah, sing it twice or this needs to be longer. Many times if the song is to short, by the time you get your nerve up, you’re already done. We want to try to avoid that,” Conrad said.

Conrad said that most Counterpoints members continue with choir, giving the directors a wide range of voices to use. This year, for example, has been the largest amount of male members Counterpoints has ever had. However, Conrad said that the choral department will never completely cut someone who auditions, no matter how many people end up auditioning in the future.

“We will never reach a point where someone will not be able to get into any choir at all. We accept everyone that auditions. In the future, we might add more choirs or make certain choir groups bigger, but there will always be a place for everyone,” she said.

Students can be placed into seven different choirs, with Accents and Ambassadors being the top two show choirs. According to Conrad, though anything is possible, it takes a very mature voice, personality and work ethic for a sophomore to be in Ambassadors or Accents. Currently, only a few sophomores are in Accents, which is the highest choir a sophomore has been in so far.

When it comes to selecting who gets into what choir, Conrad said that all three directors come together and decide.

“Well, there’s no specific way. We evaluate them on tone quality and performance, and we give each one of them a score. When we group them, we start seeing how many people we have here and how many people we need for each group. Then we look at how many sopranos and how many altos and how many guys and girls are in each group as well. So, it’s a little bit subjective but we do give them ratings and figure it out,” she said.

Vessi Doncheva, Counterpoints member and freshman, said that she is nervous about auditions.

Doncheva said, “I really hope that my song and performance is good enough. I want to be able to make a good choir.” By Dhruti Patel <[email protected]>