Grade 5 Strings Quartet Places 1st at Kiwanis

By Kai Yee Li '28 

One day, my teacher Mr. Poon asked me if I would be interested in joining/starting a string quartet and attending the Kiwanis Competition. He asked me if I could ask some students if they wanted to join, and I couldn’t possibly imagine saying “no” to that. I was extremely excited, since I had never gotten a chance to play with a quartet or attend the Kiwanis Competition before. So I said “yes” and went off on my mission to get people for the quartet.

After a couple rejections, I finally found fellow grade 5 musicians who wanted to join our quartet: Dan Jia, Bella Li and Ilina Wu. Then our moms helped us set up our rehearsal times and we got started.

Luckily, we didn’t have to spend much time picking a piece to play since we just played the same piece that we played in ACP (Academy Chamber Players). The piece that Ms. Goddard picked for ACP was wonderful and, luckily, it was meant to be played in a quartet! Our practices were a lot easier because Ms. Goddard and Ms. Lemon had already spent time coaching us on this piece (thank you very much, strings teachers!).

Mr. Poon helped us prepare for the competition and also coached us (thank you very much, Mr. Poon!). Everyone was very cooperative. At every rehearsal, one of us would bring a snack for after practice. That was my favourite part of rehearsal.

The actual recording for Kiwanis was very grueling. Before we got to play the actual piece in the recording, we had to say this super long intro, and if we messed up on the intro, we had to start all over again.  Eventually, we got a pretty good recording and decided to send it to the Kiwanis Competition. The results were phenomenal. We got 1st place in our group! Yay! Click here for our performance.

I am very grateful for all the time that Ms. Goddard, Ms. Lemon and Mr. Poon put into coaching us on this piece, which led to our awesome results. I am also grateful that everyone in the quartet was very cooperative and took it seriously. Thank you, everyone!