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)
“Let music sound while he doth make his choice;
Then if he lose he makes a swan-like end,
Fading in music.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate,—and meantime it is only puss and her tail.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Note too that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)