Band and choir looking to continue growth

Mt. Hood’s choir program had a successful year achieving a unified sound, and director Kevin Lambert is excited about growth next year.

On May 30, the two MHCC choirs had their final performance at Wood Village First Baptist Church, where about 50 people performed.

“There’s been a lot of growth. It was very evident this past Friday in our concert,” said Lambert, comparing the effort to previous performances.

“It was quite evident to people that the choirs took a huge step forward this spring quarter. I got that comment from some of our singers, and I got that comment from a couple people in the audience on Friday night who have been to all of the concerts.”

Lambert said that the sound of the choir was a “neat thing to witness. It’s kind of tough to be in a choir, in terms of trying to build one cohesive sound. It’s not a time where you really want to listen to 50 individual voices.

“It’s strange when that unified sound really happens well – (the) overall impact of the sound is just largely magnified,” he said.

“That’s what happened Friday night. It really didn’t sound like a choir of 50 people, it sounded like a choir of 70 or 80, and that’s very hard work on their part — listening to each other, matching each other, and amplifying themselves.”

Lambert faced some challenges to bring every member of the choir to the same level over the course of the year, he said. “Everyone moves at their own pace, in terms of the speed that they can learn music.”

He explained that singing choir is a team effort. “Nothing about what happens in a choir is about the individual, so even though some students learn music faster, some take a little bit more time. It is really about moving the group forward together,” he said.

For next year, Lambert plans to have even more growth at MHCC. “This is the end of my second year at Mt. Hood, and the choirs have doubled in size since I got here, which I’m already ecstatic about.

“Realistically, from every spring quarter to the next fall quarter, there’s a little bit of a step back, but then by the time we get to next spring, we will definitely be bigger than what we are this spring,” he said. “It’s just kind of a one-step-back thing, then two or three steps forward.”

Like the choir program, the Mt. Hood band program also saw some growth.

The program experienced a 400 percent growth, according to instructor Grant Linsell.

The band did one large performance every quarter, with a few others sprinkled between. “With the band program in general, between the Jazz Ensemble and symphonic band and staffing the musicians for the theater department’s musical, we have quite a bit of performing going on,” said Linsell.

Overall, the band program is progressing, he said.

“I think that we’re performing at a higher level. It’s definitely a slow progress. Improvement is always a slow progress, but I think the students involved have really been engaged with trying to make it better,” he said.

For next year, Linsell hopes to keep the enrollment rising at a constant level. “The big stuff is just continuing in the direction that we’re moving now with more campus participation. I would love to see more people come out for either the Jazz Ensemble or the symphonic band,” he said.

Linsell hopes to attract students with various academic interests.

“We’ll always be able to attract a fairly large core of the music major students, who want to do it as a career. But, I think that we can continue to get really high-level musicians who have other academic interests involved, and that’s really important to me — that the ensembles mirror the diversity of the campus, as far as academic majors go.

“I think we can measure our success when we see more students who say that they didn’t think that they could keep playing in college get involved,” he said.