Walking down the band hallway during second or third period is a changed experience for Revere students and staff—if someone is lucky enough, they might pass by the choir room while Sierra Pabon is leading her students through a rehearsal. An immersive blend of voices decorated by the new director’s piano playing will greet their ears. Should they peek inside, the sight of fourty or so high schoolers crowded around that piano, each concentrating on their own additions to the music, would greet their eyes.

Pabon is the brand new choir director this year, and she has brought a sense of excitement to share with the choir to Revere with her. Teaching symphonic choir, chorale, guitar foundations and eighth grade choir, she faces new adventures every day, armed with a passion for music and education. She explained how she realized she wanted to be a teacher in her senior year.

“Through some high school leadership experience in choir and being president of the choir and being a little bit more involved, I started to realize that was a career path to take. I promptly started my auditions for music school and here we are,” Pabon said.

Singing has been a part of her life for a long time.

“[I’ve been singing] forever, really. I was involved in choir from sixth grade moving forward, but I feel like I’ve kind of always been singing,” Pabon said.

Pabon fulfilled a vocal pedagogy emphasis in her degree from Baldwin Wallace University.

“I was working with the communications and sciences disorders department and working with speech language pathologists to be able to understand how the voice works a little bit better, so really starting to understand the anatomy of the voice, the anatomy of breathing, all the muscles and parts that are involved,” Pabon said.

She integrates this knowledge into her class, giving students insight into the specifics of what is happening in their lungs and throat. Ellie Price, senior and member of both the symphonic and chorale choirs, explained this.

 “We do these breathing exercises at the beginning of class, and there’s this muscle… when you breathe, it’s like, right between your ribs. She talks about breathing out like a balloon deflating and breathing in like an inner tube inflating, so you should feel it all around,” Price said.

Pabon explained why understanding human anatomy is important to vocal training.

“[It’s] unlike band or orchestra, where you have a visible instrument where you know if you press that button, that note’s going to come out. With singing, we don’t have anything we can touch and manipulate, so we have to understand how everything actually works and understand the anatomy of it so we can understand how to manipulate it,” Pabon said.

This approach to teaching students how to sing is not the only thing Pabon does differently. She has plans for expanding Revere’s acapella group.

“She has all these ideas about acapella and expanding it. She wants to make it two semesters and meet after school, which is really cool,” Price said.

 In fact, the choir as a whole is expanding under her guidance.

“She has a lot of ideas about making choir a bigger part of the school. We do this thing where we sing in the atrium out by the main office. It has really good sound in there, so she wants to put it on the announcements that we’re going to sing that day so people can come listen to us just on a normal school day,” Price said.

 Additionally, choir and band are going to start working together more closely. Dr. Darren LeBeau, Revere band director, explained how.

 “We’re eager to start working, combining more efforts of the band and choir. We’ve done things in the past like Veterans Day, homecoming and a couple of our concerts [together]. I think we’re going to try to just work with each other, to figure out what we could do. Students can add to that or to whatever we are doing and see how that goes. But we’re both willing to see what happens,” LeBeau said.

Pabon came to Revere as her second year of teaching, the first being at Euclid High School, where she taught show choir, which combined singing and choreography, and a music tech class, which taught students to write their own songs, on top of the classes she now teaches here.

“Revere was a stand out school–very impressive academically and [has] very good administrative support. I decided to apply, and once I went through the interview process, it was very clear this school valued the music program as well as academics and athletics. It seemed like a really good balance. This is something a teacher and especially a director of a program wants to see–there’s room for growth, potential for collaborating and good support,” Pabon said.

The next opportunity to see the choir perform is on October 14 when they sing the alma mater with the band during the homecoming game at the Joseph Pappano stadium.