Revere High School (RHS)’s Reverse A Cappella group traveled to the Kettering National A Cappella Festival in Kettering, Ohio to perform and improve their skills.
The Kettering National A Cappella Festival is an annual educational festival that hosts performances from top-level university and high school a cappella groups. This year, Kettering Fairmont High School hosted the festival from the night of Friday, November 6 to Sunday, November 8. In addition to the musical performances, it also featured clinics where, after each group’s performance, they had the opportunity to meet with professional vocal coaches, singers and choreographers to hone their skills and improve as a group.
Revere’s preparation for this event started on the bus to last year’s festival. While heading to Kettering, Kaylee Carpas, a member of Revere A Capella, discussed with Sierra Pabon, RHS’s choir director, the song The Water is Fine by Chloe Ament. Carpas was enthusiastic about the song, which encouraged the two of them to work together to make arrangements for it to be in their performance at Kettering.
“[Carpas] was very passionate about it being a really good song for a capella. So I had taken on the project of arranging that song specifically for them. It was really fun to be able to showcase that. It was more of a group effort, we had a strong tie to that song,” Pabon said.
The Water is Fine is a favorite for Carpas. Beyond recommending the song to Pabon, she thought it was fun to work through the whole process of the arrangement, choreography and performance of it with the group.
“I am a soloist for The Water is Fine, so it was really near and dear to me. The make up of [the song] and how each instrument was laid out would sound good if it was arranged as a capella. Then Miss Pabon arranged it, and I helped a little bit, and that is how we decided to do that. . . . It was a song that I had listened to for a little while, and it was one of my personal favorites at the time,” Carpas said.
The group closed out their performance with Greedy by Ariana Grande, Pabon selected an upbeat and energetic song to excite the audience. She chose the two different songs to show the group’s range in ability and talent.
“The Water is Fine showcased more of [the group’s] drama and their acting, and [that song] honed in on the vocals. I feel like it was very captivating and mesmerizing for the audience, [while] Greedy is very in your face, very choreography-based, and looking for a reaction out of the audience,” Pabon said.
The group began practicing their songs in August before school started. Later, at the beginning of the school year, the group held a camp to refine and practice their songs further all together. This process of refinement is known as “cleaning,” and it is a core part of the preparation process.
“About a week or two before school starts, we hold an a cappella camp where we were given these songs over the summer, and we learned them ahead of time. Then, during the camp, we cleaned and fine-tuned everything. We have been continuing to do that all school year,” Carpas said.
Myles Kelly, another member of Reverse A Cappella and also a soloist on The Water is Fine, described the process and continued preparations leading up to the festival.
“We did a lot of work, a lot of cleaning. Day after day, we would break down every song as much as we could, and we would run it as much as we could before the performance,” Kelly said.
Hard work in preparing for the event proved to be successful after Revere a cappella enjoyed the praise from the audience.
“People really liked us, we got cheers, groups around us congratulated us, it went overall well for us. Ms. Pabon thought it was really good, and everybody in the group feels good about it,” Kelly said.
Pabon was also impressed with how the group performed from last year and how they took the most out of the opportunity of being there.
“Every year, we know that we want to get as much as we possibly can out of the festival. We truly take advantage of the experience and make it as worthwhile as possible,” Pabon said.
From Pabon’s perspective, participating in the festival provided the group with a great learning experience.
“I would say what we learned from watching other high school groups is that there is not really a ceiling on our potential. There is definitely more that we can work to accomplish. I feel like there have been a lot of takeaways from those other groups in terms of how they carry themselves, how they do choreography, to specific vocal elements of their performance. Our clinicians that we worked with really dug in deep to a lot of our own music that we are going to have the chance to perform again. I think the goal is to be able to take their feedback and apply it to further performances in terms of what we specifically learned,” Pabon said.
A key highlight of the event for the group was the clinics. They learned from professionals and other high-performing schools to grow as singers and performers.
“We get clinics where we get to work with professionals on our set specifically, and they give us feedback. As a group, we are really looking forward to being able to take notes from those professionals, and then there is individual clinics that we can work on our skills individually,” Carpas said
Another key highlight for Pabon was a surprise from her fiancé, a director at Avon Lake High School, that brought two a capella groups to the festival. The couple brought their groups together for dinner to celebrate their engagement.
“When we got downstairs for dinner, he brought his group, and they made a big circle, and they serenaded us and sang a love song. They brought us cake to celebrate the engagement, and we all had dinner and cake,” Pabon said.
