More than 600 people gathered to hear the angelic voices of hundreds of Pennoyer students resonating throughout the school Wednesday night during the annual holiday choral concert.
The Pennoyer holiday music concert is the most anticipated event of the year for the school’s long-running music program.
The kids sing 24 songs together as a group to celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, and the many different nationalities of its students. The concert also offers a chance for students with musical talents other than singing to shine.
For fourth-grade twins Alexandra and Ivan Shapkarov, the Pennoyer holiday concert was a chance to show off their piano-playing skills to their classmates for the first time.
The pair teamed up to play a joint holiday song together called “Pat-a-Pan.”
Alexandra Shapkarov said she was nervous to play in front of her classmates, but the song “started getting easier by the minute,” she said.
“I like playing piano because it helps me do better in school,” Shapkarov said. “If you master the piano you can master anything.”
The Pennoyer holiday concert presents a rare moment each year when students throughout the school get together and sing as a group, but Pennoyer continues to offer year-round opportunities that allow students with a passion for music to engage in their love of singing during all months of the year.
Music director Lisa Petergal launched Pennoyer’s first after-school choral program when she was hired to teach music at the school 20 years ago.
“I was a general music teacher, and I saw so many kids who loved singing and wanted more opportunities to sing,” Petergal said. “I asked if I could start an after-school group, and it eventually started growing over the years.”
The program was slow to catch on, Petergal admits, with only about 12-15 students joining during the first year. But over the years more kids started to join, and the chorus has now since doubled in size to include about 30 kids in grades fourth through eighth this school year.
With five different grades of students in a single choir, Pennoyer’s choral program is structured differently than the traditional elementary and middle school choruses because it infuses the wide range of ages together into one unified singing group.
The range of multiple grades gains even more diversity in the way Petergal sets up the singers to perform different parts of each song.
Instead of separating the altos from the sopranos and the more mature voices from the high-pitched ones like most school choruses do, Pennoyer’s chorus is divided into just two groups, with the girls singing all the higher-pitched parts of the songs and the boys taking the lower notes.
“This is one big group with everyone singing together,” Petergal said. “We don’t have any basses or tenors because most of the boys’ voices haven’t changed yet.”
The diverse age range encourages teamwork, Petergal said. The older students take on the role of mentors by helping the younger kids read the music and understand the harmonies.
“They interact together similar to the relationship between older and younger brothers and sisters,” she said.