Wow. Just- wow. These humans are incredible.
I recently went on tour with my high school's Chamber Choir! We attended a Worldstrides Brand competitive festival in San Francisco! If you haven't seen my million Instagram posts, check my feed for cheerful moments with these folks. Anywho, I'm here to talk all about it!
(This is gonna be one heck of a long post, but I promise it'll be worth the read.)
My mom and I left my house on Thursday morning to meet my choir at Trabcuo Hills before boarding our bus. We got the bus packed, boarded, and ready to go shortly thereafter. As we drove for what seemed like a million hours, we made a couple of stops along the way. We stopped first at San Marcos high school and sang with their top choir. It was really amazing to work with these students knowing that our director had gone to that high school and we were learning from his high school choral director. It was so cool to watch as three generations of choral students bonded by singing together in the span of maybe 45 minutes.
After stopping there, we drove some more until we reached San Luis Obispo. When we stopped there, we hurried and packed ourselves into their Mission's Church. The mission was supposed to close at 5, and we had arrived at 4:45, but we were given the opportunity to stay past closing and sing in their church. The acoustics there were astounding. We sang and sang until it was time to go, hopping on the bus and driving for another three or four hours until we arrived at our hotel in Santa Clara around 10.
By the time we made it inside of the hotel, we were given our room keys and told to hit the hay. My hotel room did the opposite.
I was so blessed to have been rooming with three of my best friends; Hannah, Raine, and Zuri. We stayed up until about three in the morning chatting, praying, giggling, and asking Raine's Chakra Pendulum questions. We talked "real life" talk for hours, and the girls who I thought I knew everything about already became even more vibrant and interesting than before.We went to sleep around three, and then woke up the next morning to get ready to go to Stanford.
The next morning, we were on a bus by 8 AM and on our way to Stanford University. Our choir was privileged enough to partake in a short masterclass with Stanford's head of choral studies, Dr. Sano.
He workshopped our competition song set and then left us to rehearse it in one of their classrooms. Working with him was so eye opening because he brought up so many new points to what we had been trying to accomplish with our songs, and our choir obviously benefited from the experience.
After we walked around the campus, took photos, and grabbed lunch, we hopped on the bus to ride to our next destination; The Palace of Fine Arts.
We stopped there to sing two songs, and we ended up singing three! We sang "Sing Me To Heaven" followed by "The Road Home" only to be stopped by a family. It was a girl's sixteenth birthday, and they requested that we sing her "Happy Birthday" so we sang it, harmonies and all.
After leaving the dome, we trekked on over to Fisherman's Wharf in the rain. It was pouring outside, so my group walked to Boudin's Bakery immediately. We walked through their little bread museum on the second level of the bakery, and then watched them make bread from the second floor to the first for about 20 minutes straight. After leaving Boudin's, we wandered through shops, watched some sea lions on the dock, and even had a sing off with some workers at a fudge shop! It was absolutely silly and so much fun.
That night, we went to Hard Rock Café for dinner, and stuffed ourselves before the long bus ride back to the hotel. At the hotel, our choir breathed through our set before heading to our rooms, only to be dragged out of our hotel rooms thirty minutes later. Our vocal department president and vie president got everyone out of bed and into my hotel room to give a speech. Our president talked about how proud she was of all of us and no matter what we won or how we performed the next morning, she was proud of us and that's all that mattered. She passed if off to the rest of the choir and asked if we had anything to say. So many valuable words were said that night. Ryan gave a speech about how our choir is the "nexus point" of our school and our district. How we're the ones changing the world around us, especially the perception of choir and choral music. Then John and Alex and Mya talked about how this aspect of family and community meant the world to them. How some days, they don't want to get out of bed, but they'll think to themselves, "At least I've got Chamber." Next, Hannah and I talked about how much this choir has changed us and impacted our stories. We both transferred into Trabuco this year for two unrelated reasons, and God had lead us and placed us right where we needed to be. It was awesome.
The next morning, it was so rough getting out of bed. I was so tired. But I made it (just barely) to our call time. We had woken up at 4:30 to get be in full dress, hair, and makeup by 5:30 and downstairs in the lobby by 6, so that we could warm up and rehearse from 6-7. We got on the bus at about 7:30 or 8 and left for festival. We arrived at the theater about an hour before we went onstage, rehearsing our set for about a little over half of that allotted amount of time. When we went on, I kinda blacked out a little, not gonna lie.
We walked onstage in our formation backwards which was embarrassing enough, but to make matters even worse, our director took a little bit longer than usual to meet us onstage. AND THEN once he was onstage, we had to request that the door to the classroom backstage be shut so that we could hear ourselves. It was pretty humiliating. Once we were onstage though, none of that mattered anymore.
The thing about making music, especially with these specific people, is that something just clicks. It could have been the best day or the worst day ever, but at the end of the day we all love each other and will continue to make music together because that's what brings us together in the first place. Each individual has their own stories and own experiences, but when we're singing, we're one. It's honestly indescribable.
My point with that paragraph though, was that's exactly what we did. We got onstage and made music. We showed our adjudicators that we had worked so insanely hard. We proved to our director that we were good enough to make it to San Francisco and sing on that stage and in that festival. We proved to ourselves that we are good enough and that that's enough. We proved that not only do we have a great amount of potential, but we also have so much that we accomplished and that was astounding to be apart of. We sang our best and that's what mattered, so when we arrived at the awards ceremony that night, we were hoping to place Gold, but that's all that we were hoping for.
To backtrack real fast, after we performed the morning of festival, we changed and went to Chinatown and got boba and bought chopsticks and almost got hit by a few cars, but we all ended up okay because that night at Great America was the Worldstrides Festival Awards Ceremony! When we all sat there waiting for them to begin announcing the choral awards, we all held hands. We hold hands before we go on at every concert, but this was different. This wasn't a "let's hold hands so that we can pray for the Lord to bless our performance," but more of a "whatever happens, we're together and that's all that matters" sort of hold. I sat there shaking, holding hands with Jalen and Alyssa while we waited for them to call out our school. The minute the announcer said, "From Mission Viejo, California..." we all held our breath. Of course, until we began screaming.
Following our name, the announcer had said that not only did we get Gold, but we placed 2nd overall beating out some of the state's top choral programs. We averaged a 97% which means that we were only one or two more points away from first place. Additionally, we won the massive Adjudicators' Award, our very own Zuri Garcia won a Maestro Award (which was given to 10 students out of 1300), and lastly, Raine Allen, our Madame President of the Trabuco Hills Vocal Department of 2017/18 won the Ovation Award (which was given to 1/1300 people). AND THEN... we got invited to a Festival of Gold, AND invited to perform at Carnegie Hall!
![@ the awards ceremony (camille, zuri, jalen, alyssa, jayde, & hannah) [taken by raychelle]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/017b85_c21ec66edd06436781fa6d26da55e22b~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_640,h_800,al_c,q_85,enc_auto/017b85_c21ec66edd06436781fa6d26da55e22b~mv2.jpg)
So basically, if you have no idea what all of those awards mean, point is, WE SWEPT. It was unbelievable. Hannah and I were bawling our eyes out, (if you want to see more photos, here's the link to my specific choir on our vocal department website so that you can see Mr. Haro's full slideshow and you can read about our program and all that jazz: here!) and the tears didn't ever really stop. We screamed so loudly and hugged so tightly, I've never felt more at one with these people in my entire life. It was like all of the struggles and difficulty, all of the long weekday sectionals and Saturday rehearsals, everything that we had been working so hard to accomplish this year was finally worth it. I finally was reassured that this was right where I needed to be. Everything made sense for once and it was like nothing else mattered, but celebrating in that moment.
We got back to the hotel after getting kicked out of Great America and we were up WAAAAY past our curfew just hanging out in our director's room with a little over half of the choir. We just joked and laughed and made no sense for the rest of the night. (I'm not kidding when I said we made no sense. We literally sat on the beds trying to resuscitate plastic water bottles. Like- wHaT eVeN?!) And that night/the next morning, (I fell asleep at 4 AM) I woke up (at 7 AM) to the sight of our mazzive trophy and plaque. It was insane. The award was real. We really had won. I just- there weren't (and still aren't) enough words in the dictionary to describe how I was/am feeling.
Coming home from San Francisco was one of the most challenging things for me. I still wanted to wake up early still and go visit a college campus or sing somewhere on the streets. It was so heartbreaking to have to wake up knowing that I was going to go to school and no one there would have ANY idea where Chamber had just come from. No one knew that we had performed. No one knew that we had won. And it just stunk because I was so proud of all of our accomplishments, and I had no one to share them with because nobody knew.
A few days later though, into that first week back in SoCal, we were recognized by ASB and our school newsletter, and that was enough for us! They may have gotten the name of our festival wrong, but they brought us donuts, so all was right in the world. And then Sarah's mom (who is a goddess!) brought our choir gold star balloons to make us really feel like shining stars!
I'm posting this all because
A) I love recapping everything!
B) I love my Chamber Choir family!
and C) This was one of the best weeks of my life. Ever.
I know that I've said this a MILLION times or more, but if you're thinking about joining the THHS Vocal Department, stop thinking and just join! It changed my life and it sure as heck will change yours. If you need any more convincing, feel free to contact me personally either on my About Page or below, but I would love to talk to you about joining if you're on the fence.
With that, I'll bid ya farewell for a little bit!
Much Love,
Delaney Miller
