WE SET THE STAGE FOR MUSO STARS OF THE FUTURE

Last week featured one of the biggest events on the APC calendar – our Annual Music Concert.

This year’s theme was “Local Legends”, which was an apt description in so many ways.

The event took me back to our very first vaudeville show in 2011, which was held at the same venue: Memo Music Hall in St Kilda.

Since then we have grown enormously. Our fledgling music classes have morphed into the biggest instrumental music program of any state school in Victoria.

This year’s event included 98 student performers, led wonderfully by our Music Captains Luke Mason and Matilda Lester, and coordinated by our amazing Music Coordinators, Nate Taylor and Alex Hansen.

We are incredibly lucky to have such wonderful professional teacher musicians leading our student music program. In fact, we have managed to tap into a hive of Melbourne’s elite jazz musicians – all not just excellent teachers by incredibly creative artists in their own right who appear regularly all over town.

This year’s performance covered the full range of music types: vocals, percussion, chamber strings and of course pop and rock. The student band Mansplainers, who featured recently at a concert in Federation Square, were a big hit, along with our Senior Rock Band.

In typical APC style, there were many original works, composed and arranged by the students themselves. We always insist on creativity.

This included the closing number “All the livelong day”, which will feature in the original musical we will be performing later this year. It’s a teaser to another great event.

Watching the Music Concert I couldn’t help but reflect on just how brilliantly the college has achieved its founding goal of becoming a part of its community. We live in the artistic heart of Melbourne, and by staging the concert in a great St Kilda venue, we have truly taken on the responsibility for creating the musicians and other artists of the future.

The talent at the college is amazing and is about to explode onto the local scene. And I have no doubt many will make it onto the national and maybe even world scene as well.

Steven Cook Foundation Principal