The fifth-annual MICDS Sight-Singing Bee was held starting in early May and concluded with the final round of competition on Thursday, May 22, 2024. Reina Banerjee ’27 was named the Sight-Singing Bee Grand Champion.
If you are unfamiliar with sight-singing, it is when a student is presented with a piece of music or a passage of music that they have never seen before and are asked to sing it on sight using the correct pitches and rhythms. Depending on the level of difficulty, the student is given between 45 and 60 seconds to study and rehearse aloud the excerpt before performing it for evaluation. “This is a skill that we work on in every single class, every day of the year,” said Dana Self, Upper School Performing Arts Teacher. “Some students figure the sight-singing puzzle out very quickly; others take a bit more time to develop their skills. But sight-singing is something I feel very passionate about as it is a skill that these young singers can use for the rest of their lives, whether it be in a college choir, church choir, community choir, or simply picking up a piece of sheet music just for fun.”
The competition to make it to round one started back in late August. Each student in the three MICDS Choirs completed 18 different sight-singing assessments over the course of the school year. Each student has an account on SightReadingFactory.com that generates an individual exercise for the student to record and submit. Following the completion of exercise #15 in late April, the top-scoring students in each choir were eligible to participate in the preliminary round of competition. The preliminary round was completed as an open round (the students in the choirs serving as spectators), with the top three students in each choir advancing to the semi-final round.
The students eligible to participate in the semi-final round of competition included:
- Aiyla Ahmad ’26
- Reina Banerjee ’27
- Milton Duckworth ’27
- Charlie Glass ’25
- Benjamin Iken ’24
- Morgan Macam ’26
- Rebecca Sennaraj ’24
- Joe Walsh ’25
During the final week of school, the semi-finalists from each choir participated against each other. At the end of the semi-finals round, Banerjee, Iken, and Walsh moved on to the final round of competition.
After six rounds of challenging examples, Banerjee was named the 2024 Grand Champion.
“We complete three or four sight-singing exercises in class every day. Kids will balk at it from time to time, asking ‘Do we have to sight-sing today?’ My response is the same every single time, “no, you get to sight-sing today.’ I know too many choir directors who don’t teach sight-singing or think it’s too time-consuming, when in the end, if your students are strong readers, you save time because you aren’t always having to pound out notes at the piano,” Self said. “I shared with the seniors in April that over the last four years, we have looked at a total of 1,398 sight-singing exercises in class together, and each one of them has submitted a total of 78 individual graded singing assessments. That is a lot of sight-singing exercises and it’s worth every minute that we spend on it each day as it produces stronger musicians in the end.”
Congratulations to all the participants!