Local schools celebrate Music Monday

Justin Seward
Times Reporter

 

Crowther Memorial High School, Strathmore High School and Brentwood Elementary choirs celebrated a national event in ‘Music Monday’ on May 4 at Brentwood in recognition of the power of music.
The choir event’s main focus was to educate the singers about the true meaning of music and more importantly to have fun.
“Events like this are really important because they give us the chance to show younger generations there are older students that are doing awesome things. It gives them something to look up to,” said Bryan Allsop, Crowther and Strathmore High School’s choir teacher.
“They can watch this and be like ‘hey in five years I could be in that high school group’ and it would be a ton of fun.”
Allsop firmly believes that it depends on the group for the type of genres the choir will sing to.
“Our choirs do anything from pop music, musical songs to classical choir stuff and we’ve done lots of songs in different languages. It gives them versatility to be fantastic musicians and all their wide knowledge as best they can,” said Allsop.
The teaching styles for both groups are similar as they have strong understandings of music.
“For the most part I can teach them relatively the same. The high school because it’s a class, you can be more intensive with them, it’s outside the timetable, whereas at junior high it’s just a club, they don’t have the same intensity but I hand out music to the groups and they have music by the next week,” said Allsop.
Brentwood’s music specialist Carolyn Steeves could not stress more how important it is to learn how powerful music really is.
“I’ve been doing to this for 36 years, teaching music, and I think days like today are really important for the kids to see that music is a life-long thing. They can go into the junior high and senior high, still dancing and singing and carry on what they love,” said Steeves.
“Today for us was a dress rehearsal for provincials because we’re in provincials on Friday representing Drumheller festival. It’s Grade’s 4-6 classes at the Alberta Musical Festival Association.”
Steeves main goal for the kids is to have fun and enjoy what music has to offer.
“The kids loved the Music Monday song by Connor Ross, he was 16 and won the music anthem search and taught it to the kids in class. And to get to sing with other schools, a song that’s called ‘We Are One,’ it can’t get any more perfect than that,” said Steeves.