La Singers - Virtual Choir
Omnia Sol by Z. Randall Stroope
Honors Projects!
Students who are selected to participate in Lawrence Academy Singers at the Honors level are required to produce an independent project in the spring term.
Michael
Kroll
Needing to adapt from a collaborative project to a remote assignment, I took the opportunity to familiarize myself with a previously unexplored element of music: the technical aspect. Despite submitting many recordings and oral homework assignments throughout my three years in LA Singers, I'd never delved deep into the audio editing or mixing aspects of technical music! Utilizing a piece from the 1970s soul band "The Spinners," I was able to apply technology to enhance the performance. It didn't come out perfect, but I sure enjoyed the process, and I plan to utilize recording software more often in my vocal sphere!
Mary
Grabowski
claire
lanzendorf
&
This project is the culmination of four years of friendship. Having been in LA Singers together for the entirety of our high school careers, this project has allowed us to reflect on our time at LA and together. For our project, we covered Across the Universe by the Beatles, with layered harmonies and Mary on the ukulele. While our project certainly changed quite a bit over this past term, its essence has remained the same. We hope you enjoy!
henry
trainor
My honors project went through a bunch of drastic changes since quarantine started. I originally was doing my own arrangement of Ave Maria in a quartet with Avery Cheeks, Stephen LaSala, and Malcolm Fry, but that shifted to a different and slightly easier song called The Sun is in Your Eyes by Jacob Collier. The way I was doing the project shifted into more of an editing project and ended up sounding a lot worse than I expected (not due to my group mates, but because of the way I chose to do my project). In the last day, I went from trying to change songs to eventually ending up back where I started that day and just tried recording myself singing the Jacob Collier song. It’s a new song so there isn’t much out there about it yet, so learning the guitar part was quite the challenge. It took many, many tries of messing up the lyrics to messing up the guitar part or both, but after about an hour of attempts at recording a 2 minute song I finally had something that I was mildly satisfied with. I hope you like it!
sabrina
ladiwala
Please click on the following videos to watch and hear Sabrina's Honors Senior Recital.
Honors Senior Recital - Part 1
Honors Senior Recital - Part 2
katherine
dickey
Artistic Expression
Explanation: I recently had to take a few months off from playing piano, and now I have been taking my lessons over Zoom, which works but is less than perfect. The two pieces I recorded is a little bit of what I’ve been working on for the past 2 months. The Chopin Prelude is a piece that I had listened to a lot and taught myself little bits of, so I thought it would be a good first piece to learn once I began playing again. It’s called the “Raindrop” prelude as the piece mimics the arc of a storm, and the constant Ab/ G# in both hands represents the steady fall of rain. The Poulenc is the first of three movements, and it is one of my favorite pieces to play. I learned it around 5 years ago, but on days when I feel like playing but not practicing (which has been happening a lot lately), it’s really fun and comforting to play through. It was hard to miss my senior year of piano, but I’m really glad I got to play some of my all time favorites like the Brahms Rhapsodien and Liszt’s Un Sospiro in my sophomore year recital at LA, and that I was able to have the Singers perform a song I wrote last year! Right now, I’m learning Claire de Lune and the Gershwin preludes to play in a summer recital, and I hope to work on all the pieces that were originally going to be my senior recital this summer. I have loved playing (and sometimes singing) for LA Singers and at different concerts and recitals throughout my time at LA!