Music and Performing Arts
The teaching of Performing Arts within the school is assisted by the newly-constructed auditorium and administration complex. The educational music programme covers performance, composition, analysis, history and aural skills. Along with the option of taking music as a subject, there is also a compulsory Year 9 course, focussing on the appreciation of music and drama in everyday life through theoretical and practical exercises, which runs for multiple weeks throughout the year.
The school has a number of performing groups: a choir ('Voicemale'), a Barbershop Chorus ('Virtutti'), a Concert Band, Stage Band, and Junior Symphonic band. Orchestral groups include the Westlake Symphony, Chamber Orchestra and the junior Taharoto Orchestra. The performing groups regularly win awards at the annual KBB Music Festival (formerly the Auckland Secondary Schools Band and Orchestra Festival or 'ASSBOF'). Some groups, such as the Choralation Choir, which won the platinum award at the Big Sing Finale in 2009, 2010, and 2011 are combined with Westlake Girls High School.
The school also holds (mostly annual) drama productions. Recent productions have included Guys & Dolls, School of Rock, Wind in the Willows, Once on Chunuk Bair, Footloose, Romeo and Juliet, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Little Shop of Horrors.
Read more about this topic: Westlake Boys High School
Famous quotes containing the words performing arts, music, performing and/or arts:
“More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.”
—Uta Hagen (b. 1919)
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Bottom. What is Pyramus? A lover or a tyrant?
Quince. A lover that kills himself, most gallant, for love.
Bottom. That will ask some tears in the true performing of it. If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay—in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)