I have just returned from a wonderful three days of music making with a fantastic group of Carey musicians. Around 130 students climbed into buses on Saturday for the two-hour drive out to rural Blampied. Carey has been visiting Rutherford Park in the rolling rural hills near Daylesford for many, many years to host our annual Autumn Music Camp. The complex there, built and run by the Jackson family, is large and comfortable. There are terrific spaces for our ensembles to perform and, importantly in the freezing conditions, it is very well heated.
It is such a wonderfully positive and educational experience being able to be fully immersed in music for three days. My involvement was mainly with the choral program. Our regular choir rehearsal is just 40 minutes a week, so having extensive time to explore both vocal technique and repertoire enables so much to be achieved. By the end of the camp, the pieces we were preparing for the forthcoming Whole School Choral Concert were solidly established and sounding great. The biggest challenge was the Hamilton medley – over 50 pages of music – which was being sung with enormous enthusiasm and impressive accuracy.
Instrumental groups too made significant progress. The camp allows us to run many small tutorials, and having specialist music tutors resident allows generous access to their skills. A special highlight for the band musicians this year was presence of a guest conductor, wind band legend Ken Waterworth, who came to work with the Concert band.
The work achieved on this camp will be on display at some significant upcoming events:
- the Bands Concert on 27 May (MGH, 7.00pm)
- the Whole School Choral Concert on 7 June (IWA, 7.00pm)
- Victorian School Music Festival, where Vivaldi Strings will perform on 2 June.
Last Friday, all of Middle School celebrated music with our House Music competition. It was conducted in a wonderfully positive spirit, with a huge amount of enthusiasm, creativity and performing arts skills on display. Sincere congratulations to all of the House teams for their wonderful efforts.
Martin Arnold
Head of Music
