Wildcat Tales: How did you prepare for the competition?
Junior Schuman Chen: Every week Mr. Coatney gave us a day, sometimes two days, to practice our ensemble music with our group, so we basically took advantage of that work day. Since our piece wasn’t that long, we split it into two parts and worked on them separately. After we played the first half, we moved to the second, and then we put it together.
Junior Britney Bautista: Our group ran through the whole song at least five times, but if we made mistakes as we went along we played that part until we could get it right and at tempo.
Wildcat Tales: Was this your first solo and ensemble competition?
Junior Jong Kim: No, this was my second time competing in the solo and ensemble competition, so I definitely had the experience of performing in front of the judges. It’s quite amazing how, when you compete for the first time, the pressure and the trepidation overwhelms you but that only seems to exist in the beginning. In addition to that, I was not worried about being pressured and being nervous while performing.
Junior Giulia Romani: No this was my third to enter, the first was in sixth grade when I had a short solo, then in seventh grade was my first ensemble trio, then again this year in a ensemble sextet.
Chen: Yes. But most of my ensemble members have already gone to solos and ensembles. I was a little nervous and I didn’t really know how everything worked so it was very reassuring to have people in my group who had done it before.
Wildcat Tales: How did your ensemble group decide to pick the music?
Bautista: The ensemble groups didn’t pick the music. Mr. Coatney grouped together who he thought would work best with each other and assigned us the pieces. The music was challenging, but it made us work harder to get the best ratings.
Kim: I’m glad that we didn’t have the option to choose the music since I’m very indecisive. I liked the music though, it was quite facile and easy to corroborate with my other group members.
Wildcat Tales: What was your prediction for the competition?
Chen: I didn’t really know what to expect, since I hadn’t done this competition before. However, I hoped that we would do well and that our hard work would pay off. I predicted that the competition would be very fun and rewarding.
Kim: I extrapolated a high rating because our group worked really hard and played with confidence during our performance.
Bautista: I predicted that our ensemble group would do phenomenal. We had worked hard each week to get each and every detail right.
