Music fills the halls of LHS as students work to prepare for the upcoming Coffee House Concert. This variety show is set to take place in the high school cafeteria on April 10th. While being a similar show to Prism, it’s a more scaled down event.
“It’s just one stage and we don’t include larger groups like choir and jazz ensemble,” music director Serge Beaulieu said. “For that reason it’s more scaled down with one stage. The audience sits in normal seating, we don’t do the tables like we did at Prism.”
In this show, the students are allowed to choose any song they want to perform and often choose music they enjoy listening to.
“We have a couple of kids that put together a rock band or some smaller chamber groups,” Beaulieu said, “so sometimes a couple of saxophone [players] will come together and do something but a lot of it is students singing a solo with a karaoke track.”
Students have been collaborating together to create small bands for the upcoming concert as well as working on solo acts of their own. Junior Dylan Anderson has been practicing for the songs he will be playing as a solo and with a group of his friends.
“The songs that I’m performing myself I’ve just been playing through at home,” Anderson said. “For the ones for the band, we’ve done a little bit of practice at home. We just have to get together and practice as a group.”
Many students audition for the Coffee House Concert for many reasons. Junior James Dooley decided to audition since it would be “a fun way to get to perform with friends.”
“I’m excited to be working with a vocalist in a smaller ensemble,” Dooley said. “The Coffee House Concert is a great way to try new or unique musical groups that you haven’t worked with before.”
The Coffee House Concert offers opportunities for freshmen to gain new experiences performing. Freshman Eva Zaremba hopes to “gain the experience of performing a duet.”
“[Duetting] is very different from the other performances I’ve done in the past,” Zaremba said. “We’ve been fortunate enough to use the piano room to practice instead of finding our own space.”
The Coffee House Concert has been an ongoing event for nearly twenty years, starting a few years after Prism.
“After we successfully started Prism, the students wanted more opportunities to perform and they kept asking to do a second Prism, but that would be too much work,” Beaulieu said. “I ended up getting the idea from the middle school since they had been doing a coffee house concert.”
According to Beaulieu, the Coffee House Concert is typically “about the same every year.”
“I always hope to see a little bit more diversity in song selections,” Beaulieu said. “A lot of students like to pick pop and rock music but I always like to see more students pick instrumental type music that they play using their band or string instruments as opposed to just a singer singing with a rock band or a singer singing with a karaoke track. And I always like to see variety so when someone chooses to sing a Broadway song or classical song as opposed to pop and rock.”
There are many excited to get a chance to perform and show off their talent to their friends and family.
“Anyone can come and it’d be great to have more people there to see what talent there is at our school musically and I’m looking forward to it,” Anderson said.
