Music
Tech High School has a strong music program, with orchestra, band, and choir as the three major components. Many students take two different music classes. The orchestra, led since 2009 by Kara Mather, is broken into three groups, according to ability: Concert Orchestra, Symphony Orchestra, and Chamber Orchestra. The Chamber Orchestra is a smaller elite team of musicians who have volunteered to practice before school one day a week. It performs at special events in the community, as well as at Tech. Symphony Orchestra is the primary orchestral group at Tech, and the Concert group comprises mostly freshman and sophomore students. A notable previous director of the orchestra program is Steven Eckblad, now retired, who is still a prominent musician in the St. Cloud area, teaching cello and bass while playing bass in the St. Cloud Symphony Orchestra. Some Tech students also participate in the St. Cloud Symphony. The band is conducted by Gary Zwack, and the choir by Kevin Kiffmeyer. Starting in the 2012-13 school year, an AP music theory course will be offered, taught by Zwack. The Tech Band and Orchestra have a tradition of going on tour every two years to a major city in the United States. In 2012, the destination was New Orleans, Louisiana, and in 2010 the destination was New York City. The 2014 destination is yet to be determined.
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Famous quotes containing the word music:
“I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.”
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)
“Noble and wise men once believed in the music of the spheres: noble and wise men still continue to believe in the “moral significance of existence.” But one day even this sphere-music will no longer be audible to them! They will wake up and take note that their ears were dreaming.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)