By Zara B, Year 12 Music Rep

On Sunday 16th of January, a group of eight Year 12 singers were invited to sing with ten other GDST schools at the Royal Academy of Music as part of the GDST Sing concert.

We arrived at 10am for refreshments before beginning rehearsals soon afterwards, where we prepared five different songs to be performed in a concert at the end of the day. One of the main focuses of the day was to celebrate female composers; one of the songs, “I sing of a maiden”, was composed by our conductor, Amy Bebbington, and another, “The Voice Inside”, was specially composed for this event by GDST alumna Katie Jenkins. It was a really fun experience to spend the day singing, and it was very rewarding to produce such a successful concert with only a day of rehearsals. During our breaks, we had the opportunity to explore some of the Academy and I enjoyed seeing some of their facilities (and getting jealous about their multitude of grand pianos…).

After not being able to do live performances in large ensembles for a while due to Covid, it was really refreshing to be able to perform and produce such an impactful sound with students from other schools. One of the highlights for me was during the concert, when the conductor involved the audience by teaching them a song and we all sang it together in harmony. I look forward to hopefully taking part in similar events in the future!