Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Silver or Gold
Silver or Gold.We got a Silver.
When it was announced that the St. Andrew's Junior College choir, my choir, received only a Silver award for the SYF Central Judging, I was so disappointed that I couldn't engage my body to produce anything more than a couple of claps. Although Silver isn't too bad an accomplishment considering the fact that two years earlier the choir did just as well as we did, but the fact that a Gold was within our grasps makes our loss all the more depressing.
What went wrong? Were the acoustics bad? Was it our nerves? Our volume?
Frankly, I have no idea. I just know that we didn't do our best today. In fact, when we were having our final warm ups in the holding room before heading for the stage, we produced what I thought was one of our best sounds ever. You could literally hear our confidence then; we were that sure of ourselves. But, in reality, the playing field is vastly different from what we're used to. On the stage, things took a turn for the worse, and we simply underperformed. That's why we were praying for a Gold so badly; we knew that with that level of performance, we wouldn't be able to get any better than a measly Silver. Yet we held on to that tiny sliver of hope that somehow, the judges will overlook our mistakes and award us a Gold.
Tough luck.
Another reason for the overall sombre mood of the choir is that we have merely sustained our performance from two years ago and haven't improved. Now that's not too bad, but coming from a JC where the general opinion is that the Saints Chorale sucks, an SYF Silver has many implications. The choir, already branded as one of the lousier choirs from the 16 JCs, retains this unfortunate image. Furthermore, the school doesn't treat us any better than public judgment, either; we have only two working keyboards, of which one is slightly off-pitch, and we have only a choir cupboard to store all our scores, keyboards, etc. And to imagine that bloody cupboard is even smaller than the dresser I have in the hostel... Meh. With a Silver, the odds of a change of situation is highly unlikely.
The only consolation we have is that we really had only about two and a half weeks to prepare for SYF anyway. Prior to our concert (which was on 15th April, by the way), we didn't have much time to work on our set pieces, and even then we only just started practicing our third set piece. Moreover, about 10 new people joined within the week after the concert; taking all these into account, it's amazing that we even managed a Silver in the first place. Good job everyone. I thank you all for being willing to put your time and effort into something I believe in.
But I must say that I really feel sorry for the Yishun JC people... They were the only Bronze medallist today. They must feel much shittier than we do right now.
As for you JC1 Saints chorristers, I expect you to put as much, if not more, dedication into the choir as the batch before you (well, most of us) did. I hope those of you who originally intended to join only to help us out in SYF remain as permanent members, especially the guys. Did you know that we only had four Basses and three Tenors for the entire second half of last year? If you don't want that to become a problem you'd have to face after your seniors step down, you'd better start recruiting again or make the leavers stay or something. I'm sorry that you didn't get as good a start this year as you would've expected, but we've done the most we could. Just work on your future juniors so that our choir doesn't remain a Silver when the next SYF comes around. If you guys screw my - our - choir up, I'll come back and kill each and every one of you.
Sorry for droning on so much, I hope you'd understand.
