because it's worth resposting from my dayre...
it started with
http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/education/from-shunned-cca-to-trendy-crowd-puller this is what happened to us too. 😁
When I was in primary sch, I was in ensemble and chinese dance. Let's just ignore the Chinese dance because I was terrible at dancing but we got silver/gold for SYF. 😆
I joined ensemble because I was good at recorder. 😅 back then our ensemble was recorder and .... I can't rmb now. N we got Gold. So I stayed on and ensemble changed to angklungs and kolintang. And i played angklungs. Not one note only, sorry we are too pro for it. 😉 each of us plays 2 octaves I think.
Tbh we were q terrible till someone dropped by and taught us some tricks and boy, we became good and eventually we won gold for SYF.
So to me, SYF is easy. It's always silver / gold (back then there's no gold w honors).
Till I enter Chinese Orchestra in secondary school.
In my era, we joined whichever we like. And I joined CO because... my mum doesn't allow me to do TKD. 😅
So off I go to CO. And initially I found it q weird?
1. I was allocated to pipa because there's only 1 sec 4 senior playing tt.
2. No respect to the conductor.
3. There was like around 10 sec 1s? My cohort has 10 × 40 = 400 students and yet there's 10?
And when we (my partner & i) were told to join the SYF, we are like wow, we can go! And it became ohmygod I can't master all. Eventually we got a certificate of participation. 😭😭😭 I didn't know there's one to begin with. I was so upset.
I don't rmb when... we changed our conductor to 郑老师. Probably right after SYF... and he actually brought in instructors. So for each section, there's an instructor and mine was Ling laoshi.
He was a v fit man who appears so fierce and is so fierce but a really good teacher. And we really started from 弹&拨. Our first class was really just 弹&拨 without pressing any string. We are then advanced to use all our fingers and eventually playing Cc dd ee...
Our first piece was (I can't rmb the name nw).
I still won't forget the year we couldn't perform on stage for CNY. Which CO do not perform on stage? Ours.
We grew in numbers nxt yr too. We worked so hard at CCA fair to gain members.
And we began SYF training the moment we can. By then... I think we were too big to fit into the music room and we shifted outdoors because we did not have our own room. Or rather, we used to have till we get kicked out.
I remember the tough training and the fun parts.
We had training camp too whereby we trained the whole day and stayed over for a night and we will do fright night.
We played crazily too at welcome & farewell parties. 😅
I remembered the moment he was so pekchek at us that he just walked away till he calmed down and start all over again.
We were all ready for SYF but SARS struck sg. SYF got delayed and we had to re-adjust. It was finally the day...
And we won silver!
We screamed louder than everyone because we really put in lots of efforts. Seniors cried and I can relate because I met the conductor before. It's like the efforts we put in really churned results!
And my conductor couldn't stop at this... he wanted us to do a concert nxt yr by ourselves.
We did it 💪💪💪
The concert was so fun.
I remembered him saying that he wanted to give us sth tt belongs to us. 😁😁 He refused to do a combined one w band.
Thank you.
He really taught me that transformation is possible, as long as we put our heart into it.
He gave us confidence.
He gave us memories that I will never forget.