The Orchestra held their 20th annual Dinner Concert on Dec. 6. This concert contains a dinner and raffle to raise money, as well as songs relating to the chosen theme of the year: this year’s theme was movies. The orchestra performed songs from Mission: Impossible, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars.
Junior James Colombo said that the orchestra raised significant funds this year to help pay for concerts and trips.
“We did well in the dinner portion of the concert as in raising money for the orchestra. We raise money for our orchestra trips and concerts that we do later on in the year. My freshman year there was the Chicago trip, and last year was the Nashville trip,” Colombo said.
Orchestra teacher John Mazar said that an interesting aspect of the concert this year was a student arranging a song.
“One of the highlights of the concert this year was that Mason Thayer arranged a piece of music for the concert. He wanted to do the song ‘Making Christmas’ from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and we couldn’t find the music for it so he wrote his own arrangement. It was really neat to see,” Mazar said.
Senior Mason Thayer said that there was a lot of listening to the original song and taking aspects from different arrangements that went into creating his own version.
“Arranging my piece entailed me basically sitting in front of the computer and listening to the song over and over again, as well as looking at other arrangements of the song and seeing how other people did it and taking different parts from certain pieces and mixing them all together and making it like a kind of new music soup,” Thayer said.
Junior Hershi Prabhu said that although the orchestra performed more songs than usual, the songs were less high level so they could be learned faster.
“For this concert we had more music than normal concerts. We usually have three pieces but this time we had seven. These pieces were easier so we would work on one piece for a week and then move on to the next one,” Prabhu said.
Thayer said the orchestra played in tune well but had trouble staying on tempo throughout the concert.
“I’d say that all in all we were pretty intune but the main downfall was the tempo. We got a little off tempo at some parts in some songs. The tempo wasn’t exactly steady; in some places we kind of started to slow down and so it kind of felt like it was going to stop, but it fortunately never did. It will usually fluctuate back to the correct tempo after a while,” Thayer said.
