Out of the 475 students who auditioned for the honor band, 482 who auditioned for honor choir and 98 who auditioned for jazz band, six students from PCHS were chosen to be in the Illinois Music Education Association District IX Honor Ensembles (ILMA.)

The students who were selected to be in the ensembles include: Alison Eubanks, junior, accepted in honor choir as an alto 2, Jordan McCully, senior, accepted in honor choir as an alto 1, Joseph Sarabia, senior, accepted in honor choir as a tenor 1. Lucas Forbear, junior, accepted in honor band and jazz band with their trombone, Lillian Pankhurst, senior, accepted in honor band with their flute and Simon Snydersmith, junior, accepted in honor jazz band 3 with their electric bass.

“The festival is on November 21st, and I don’t think we’re really singing, it’s more of some master classes and some insperational stuff over zoom on that Saturday, ” McCully said.

While the stress of auditioning is over, it doesn’t take away the amount of practice and work students went through to get here.

“You practice and reherse two different sections of two different pieces of music and normally you would sing them acapella. It was similar this year except we had to record ourselves singing and send that in. Then we would do some triads and some scales and send those in,”  McCully said.

There was no sightreading portion of the audition this year, but that didn’t make the auditions any easier.

“We get rated on each individual clip we sent in and whoever ends up with the most amount of points on the auditions would get selected to be in the district festival,” McCully said.

After waiting to see who was accepted into the district ensembles, the few who were accepted were very excited.

“I was beyond excited to get in, it’s been one of my goals to get into and be a part of the senior chorus since freshman year. I auditioned both my sophomore year and my junior year and I didn’t get in, but it was really awsome and I’m super excited to be in it this year,” McCully said.

The students qualified for the district ensembles don’t know if they have been accepted for state ensembles, the results for qualifiers will be released in early December.

“If you got enough points to be in the state chorus, then you can be selected to be in the ILMA state chorus, but they are postponing that until maybe they can go back in person,” McCully said.