March 7, 2025, melodic tunes and loud cheers buzz from inside the Buena auditorium at 6 p.m.. The VUSD combined choir, consisting of VUSD’s elementary choir, Soulfege, Cabrillo middle schools choir, Balboa middle schools choir, Buena high schools choir, CSU Channel Islands chorus and ChannelAire chorus. The choristers sang their hearts out, bringing joy and excitement to the audience around them.

As the choristers sing the audience watched in awe, listening to the melody the students painted. The buena highschool choir performance was truly breathtaking as the students sang in harmony. “What if?” by Cody Fry was by the look of it a crowd favorite. The choir’s uplifting vocals, paired with the song’s inspiring lyrics, encouraged listeners to embrace the risk of failure for the chance at success and freedom.

“[The] performance was truly amazing, I thought everyone dealt with the nerves very well,” Choir Director Kevin Downey said.

The Buena choir class performed a total of four songs, one joint song [“Stand together” by Jim Papoulis] with the VUSD combined choir. They performed “Belonging” by Marie Claire Saindon, “Scarborough Fair” arranged by Michael Higgins and “What if” by Cody Fry. They don’t usually perform four songs with only two months to prepare in the span of two months so they had to work extra hard in a timely manner. 

“I’m just really happy the kids got the chance to work with the choral clinician, Dr. Kuanfen Liu, she did an amazing job with the kids,” Buena choir teacher Kevin Downey said.

Liu sits quietly to the side of the stage, listening to the students, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses and then assesses what they should do to improve their performance. A choral clinician can be proven quite useful for the choir’s development and success. She gives the students new goals to practice and points out how they should improve, giving motivation and  credibility to their hard work.

Liu said everyone did an amazing job and all she had to do was go over some new warm ups for them so they could improve. She also had them do vocalization warm ups and in the end you could tell how those little things Liu went over really helped them improve. 

“I was feeling all sorts of emotions, but I’d say I was mostly excited just to be up there and sing the song we worked hard on to perfect,”  freshman Elynn Sandoval said.

Sandoval is in Buena High school’s choir class and said that even though she was very nervous she was still very excited to sing all the songs for everyone. Sandoval says out of all the songs they had performed Scarborough Fair was her favorite. Sandoval explains the melody of the song and the piano is one of her core reasons she likes the song as well as the end of the song was really nice.

“Scarborough Fair” arranged by Micheal Higgins is a traditional medieval song that gives off eerie vibes sending chills to the audience keeping them focused on the lyrics while being guided by the soft tunes.

“Everyone did their very best performing and I had so much fun watching all the other choruses sing their songs,” Sandoval said.