The Los Altos High School choir is used to traveling from the 600s wing to the quad across campus, but this summer they’ll expand their horizons and sing overseas. In just a couple months, the choir will be performing in Spain, sharing their talents with a new audience. 

Arriving in Seville, Spain, the LAHS choir will perform at informal concerts and small churches during their short stay. They will then take a bus down to Lisbon, Portugal, where they will meet several other choirs, such as the Monta Vista High School choir, and begin preparing for a combined concert to end the trip.

“For some students, it will be their first time out of the country,” Diez said. “It’s exciting to make music and immerse yourself in a new culture and a new location where you are seeing the sights, hearing language, eating the food and meeting new people. It’s a really enriching experience.”

That’s not to say this trip will be solely musical. With the help of Perform International, a travel agency that specializes in performance tours for school music groups, the LAHS choir has scheduled sightseeing and day trips as well. 

“I’m excited to sing outside of school and to go somewhere in Spain since it will be my first time going to Europe,” junior Chengzhi Wang said. “It’ll be super fun since choir has one of the best communities at school, and Ms. Diez is one of the best choir teachers.”

Even with the group discounts from Perform International, the trip is still expensive. To cover the cost, choir students have been fundraising in many different ways. The LAHS choir spent December singing holiday carols and Valentine’s Day serenading students to fundraise. They have also received money through donations, and most of the money has gone towards lowering the cost of the trip as much as possible.

“Money should not be a reason people can’t go,” Diez said. “We just make sure that we have enough money to cover the people who need it.”

There’s a donation link on the Los Altos High School Web Store that can be used for donations or one could donate through a check made out to LAHS and give it to Diez or the finance office. 

At the big Choir Festival in Lisbon, the LAHS choir will be performing a couple classical pieces and some masterworks, such as Mozart coronation mass and Handel’s Zadok the priest. In the LAHS featured performances, the LAHS choir will perform a number of pieces they’ve sung throughout the year.

“Having the opportunity to sing in these massive churches is going to be really cool and also being able to sing with people from all around the world,” junior Madeline Randall said.

Some of the pieces the choir plans on performing are not in English. Luckily, the choir has lots of experience singing in other languages. In their spring concert, they sang in English, Latin, French, Xhosa and Russian.  

“It’s really interesting because with Los Altos being the wonderful diverse community that it is, English is not everybody’s first language in choir,” Diez said.

Diez teaches unfamiliar languages by utilizing students who can speak that language to help the class with pronunciation. One piece they will be performing, “Kwangena,” is sung in the Xhosa language and has been passed down and learned traditionally by ear. When learning this piece in class, the students learned it together by ear instead of reading the music to keep true to the way it was conceived.

This song, along with many others, will be performed at the final concert at the end of the trip along with numerous other pieces. However, these pieces will not be the first songs sung off-campus by the LAHS choir. 

Despite having taught at LAHS for four years, Diez has never done an international trip due to COVID-19. Last year, the choir went to New York, but this year, they wanted to go abroad. 

“I’m honestly looking forward to just being there and making music,” Diez said. “Some of the cathedrals we’re going to be singing in are acoustically just so awesome — these spaces are hundreds of years old and built for music to sound good.”

Some of Diez’s favorite memories of being a student in choir were being with her friends and getting to sing in some new locations that she otherwise would have never visited and she is excited to pass these memories on to her students.

“One of the best things about choirs is that we do everything together, we support each other, and we create something that’s much more exciting than we could by ourselves,” Diez said.