The Abingdonian 2019

10 The Abingdonian House Singing After narrowly missing out on last year’s title, School House came into this year’s House Singing Competition with a burning desire to re-establish themselves as the dominant house in the competition and reinstill the house pride we possessed three years ago, the last time we had won the competition. Despite last year’s valiant effort, showcasing the importance of enthusiasm towards the choice of song and the staggering volume that can be produced as a result of this, my team and I decided to approach this year’s competition in a slightly different way. Though this required a lot of work in addition to rehearsals, we saw the importance in making our song selection, The Greatest Show, truly ours. After hours of enjoyable composition and key transposing with a broken piano in the house, we were able to produce a piece we could call our own, consisting of a range of musical features that captured the original essence of the piece, as well as adding our own hint of flavour to it. We preserved the original rhythmic intensity of the piece, including the characteristic stomps, as well as the strong masculinity in the Hugh Jackman solo, which was slightly altered to be instead sung by a dozen selected bass singers in unison for an enhanced effect. In addition, we also added multiple layers of harmony, as well as a section of lyricless a capella in the middle. After this, we were fortunate to find an enthusiastic group, consisting of members of different year groups, and taught the song to them. Through this process, we were able to experiment and find out which parts of the song would be harder to teach, or were hard to sing and thus needed simplification, and most important of all, which bits worked. We proceeded to perform in front of the whole house during house assembly, and it was fair to say that we were quite severely affected by nerves, especially me as I had stepped in to conduct halfway through the song due to rhythmic blunders. However, the end product of the ensemble showed promise, and through this performance, I believe that we had showed the whole house that we were potential contenders and were approaching this year’s competition with a plan to win. However, more importantly, I believe it showed everyone that the plan was a plan that was doable, as the ensemble included members, such as myself, who had no previous experience in school- run musical activities, such as First Orchestra or Chapel Choir. Traditionally, the House Singing Competition is quite a controversial topic of discussion, as you can love it and hate it, since it does take a fair chunk of time out of your day. With prior knowledge that the Abingdon Fair was occuring during our rehearsal slots, we planned ahead in hopes of making rehearsals as efficient as possible. Also due to us being a big house in terms of numbers, we decided to separate all the students into four groups, and each group was to be led by two people who knew the piece and were also able to sing it to them. This small group teaching approach was a method that was surprisingly successful, as many groups had learnt more than half of the whole song by the end of the first