All-State. If you’re friends with a choir kid, you’ll usually hear them talking about it and how stressful it is. Though, if you’re not a choir kid, you won’t know what they’re talking about, so I’m here to inform you.

What All-State is is it’s an extra cirricular activity for choir kids in the state of Maryland (though if you’re an LHS Chamber Choir kid then it’s a grade) that has hundreds of choir students audition for a spot to make it into two choirs, the mixed choir (boys and girls), or the treble choir (all girls). The audition process can be stressful and nerve wracking, since you’re in a room alone with a judge, competing against hundreds of other students to make it into one of the two choirs. If you do make it into All-State, it can be a huge honor, especially if it’s your first time ever auditioning for it. Once you do make it into All-State, you have a few weeks to study music that gets mailed to your teacher and handed out to you, and you have to at least learn the notes and the rhythms to the songs.

Once it comes time for All-State, you have to drive up to Baltimore (which is a hell of a drive for people who live down here), and check in with two chaperones for All-State. Once you do that, you go to one of two rooms, depending on the choir you’re in, and you wait to get called for a part check. How the part checks go is there are 8 people, two per voice part, and you go into a room with two teachers and they tell you two songs that you have to sing through. Once that’s over with, if you passed the part check, congratulations! You get to spend three days in the hotel, rehearsing, making new friends, and getting ready for a high-ranking concert. If you didn’t pass the part check, sadly you must go back home.

So, if you do pass the part check, you go to a separate area and have your concert uniform checked to see if you have everything. After that, then you have your rooms assigned to you, where you go with your roommate and take your luggage, setting it there and then there’s introductions and a quick information assembly, and from there you go to your first rehearsal, where you meet your director, get your seating, which is where you’ll be sitting for every rehearsal, and that rehearsal lasts for about 4 hours, getting breaks in between for bathroom and water. After rehearsal, you eat dinner for an hour, go back to rehearsal for another two hours, then go to a large room for an activity. After the activity is done with, you go to bed, chaperones come and check on you to make sure nobody else is in your room aside from you and your roommate, and then it’s lights out. And that’s just the first day.

The next morning, you get up and go to breakfast. Breakfast lasts for a half an hour, then you go to your first rehearsal of the day, which lasts for 3 hours. After that, you go to lunch, which lasts about an hour and a half, then go back to rehearsal for around 4 hours. Then, the two choirs meet up and get on a bus that was assigned to you before you came to the hotel, and you drive to Morgan State University for a dress rehearsal. The dress rehearsal lasts for about 2 hours, then you drive back to the hotel for dessert, then head to bed.

The last day is usually the most stressful, because surprise!, it’s the concert day. You wake up and make sure everything is packed before going down to breakfast. Once breakfast is over, there is a quick hour long rehearsal, then you go back to your room, get dressed for the concert and clean the room, then checkout, which is a fairly lengthy process due to how many people there usually are. Once you’re officially checked out with the chaperones, you go down and eat lunch for an hour, have another quick hour long rehearsal to brush up on small things, then you board a different bus than the one you rode the day before, pack all your luggage onto it, and drive back to Morgan State. And from there, it’s the concert!

And that’s just the basics of what happens at All-State. There can always be small issues or mishaps that happen, like traffic, slight schedule changes, etc. But in case you were ever wondering what would happen at All-State if it’s your first year going or if you aren’t a choir kid and just wanted to know what your choir friend was stressing about, here you go.