As the end of the school year approaches, choir has one goal: to end the season right. And they hope to do that with their final concert, creating a memorable performance with a melancholic touch that will bid farewell to its senior class.

For many students, this concert will be their last one with a high school choir. Senior Max Drummond has been singing with the choir for four years. But, although it’s the end of a journey for LAHS seniors, it’s also the beginning of a new one. 

“It’ll be my last time singing for LAHS, but I feel like the program here has made the transition easier for me to go off to college and continue singing,” Max said. “I’ll miss Diez. It was lovely.”

But seniors aren’t the only ones feeling bittersweet. In honor of their graduation, choir program director Lauren Diez plans on recognizing each of the seniors that helped make the year a success.

“It’s going to be sad, maybe a little bit emotional,” Diez said. “This senior class is really special to me because the current seniors were freshmen during my first year teaching here. This is the first class of students that I had for four years in a row, so I’m just really excited to have a final concert with them.”

Unlike other past choir concerts, this one is largely student-led. Choir members have been in charge of organizing small group performances that they chose the music and rehearsed for.

“I noticed throughout the year that there’s a lot of choir students that enjoy choosing songs and learning them together for fun,” Diez said. “And after school, there’d be kids hanging out in here, just singing and jamming. So I thought that we should turn this into an opportunity for performance and give students the chance to work in smaller groups.”

“It’s so easy to express creativity this way,” Chorale member freshman Eliza Zorich said. “You don’t have to follow exactly what the teacher wants you to do. I’ve tried to think for myself, and that’s a good way to express myself.”

Choir students from different classes have been mixing and joining together to create their small groups, immersing themselves in different styles of music through their newfound creative freedom. Some groups have even been utilizing the talent of band and orchestra students to perform along with the choir.

“It’s a nice way to end the year, where we all get to express different styles of music and work with different groups of people,” Bel Canto member sophomore Isa Baratoff said.

However, doing it this way comes with its own set of challenges. Some groups have people from different choir classes, making rehearsal time difficult to coordinate because it has to be done outside of class. Nonetheless, Diez is proud of the way students step up to take responsibility and sees the possibility of this becoming a yearly tradition.

“It presents new challenges and new learning opportunities,” Diez said. “But students are taking a lot of ownership because they are songs they selected themselves. It’s been really neat to see them working together to learn the songs and turn it into a performance.”

In the end, the last choir concert holds a different significance for each person. For graduating seniors, it’s a meaningful goodbye to high school choir. For others, it’s only the start of new experiences as choir continues to diversify its approach to music. 

Buy tickets for the concert today at 7 p.m. in the Eagle Theatre at the door or at the LAHS Finance Office. Tickets are $5 for students, $10 for general admission, and free for all staff.