This year, the Accents will not perform at the Indiana State School Music Association (ISSMA) state qualifications on April 28. Instead, according to director of choirs Kathrine Kouns, the choir will find local opportunities, such as performing at the middle schools.

Accent and junior Julia Schmitz said, “ISSMA is a great performance opportunity for mixed groups like the Ambassadors; however, for women’s groups, the song list we get to choose from is limited.”

According to Kouns, the choir would have chosen two songs from a list provided by ISSMA, picking songs that would fall under certain ISSMA standards for the competition level. However, with the limited song choice from the list, Kouns said it is hard to find suitable music for the choir to perform.

“There is really not a lot of flexibility for us as teachers to program whatever we want because it is really dictated by the events that we have,” Kouns said. “I think it is extremely important for the girls to be learning concert choir literature and getting that experience to sing that kind of music, but we don’t have a lot of places in our year where we can program it. So the three songs we get to do for ISSMA are really the only chance we get to perform that genre all year.”

Kouns said in response to the decision to not attend ISSMA, the Accents were accepting of the change and are still working hard on the concert choir literature.

Schmitz said, “I know of some girls in Accents that were looking forward to ISSMA. But, we (Accents) now have more time to prepare for the spring concert (to perform concert choir music).”

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