Succasunna’s Andrew Darling Accepted into the American Choral Directors Association National Honor Choir

By Steve Sears

Roxbury High School senior, Andew Darling,

does many things well.

He has toiled in the Roxbury Community Garden, served as both a baseball and softball umpire, is President of his school’s Student Council, and has been known to ace stage roles as an actor and dancer. In fact, his most recent role was as Jack for Into the Woods.

It may be with his singing that Darling stands out most, and he was accepted this school year into the American Choral Directors Association National Honor Choir. He was informed of the good news by Roxbury High School Choir Director, Patrick Hachey, in November.

“For a kid just from a small town, to think that you’re going to go to Cincinnati and sing with many other national level singers, it was very humbling, and definitely a cool experience to hear that for the first time,” Darling recalls of the fall conversation.

Darling and other ACDANHC members were invited to Cincinnati from February 22 to February 25. He says, “When we sang for the first time together in the large ballroom in the hotel, there was nothing like this sound that came out of the choir.” “Zadok the Priest,” a popular anthem by George Frideric Handel, was the song, and it sent chills up Darling’s spine. “It is just this old, classical sound, and there is just nothing like it. At that moment - I am going to call it true musical theater - just singing in that room made me realize that I made the right choice of following my passion with music in life. After we sang, the choir director (Eugene Rogers) looked at us and said, ‘How do you feel about that?’ Everyone was just sort of nervously laughing because we all were just in awe of the sound that just came out of that group.”

Darling and the National Honors Choir eventually performed for an audience at the Cincinnati Music Hall.

For Darling, who will attend Marymount Manhattan College in the fall, the thought of entertaining initially came by a suggestion. An athlete until he was an 8th grader, he injured his knee in a wrestling match. During his time away from the mat, his friends asked him to audition for the Eisenhower Middle School musical, Mary Poppins. He got the lead role and has not looked back. “As much as I wanted to go back to sports, my eyes couldn’t come off the stage,” he says.

As for his singing, the seed was truly sown in his freshman year by his voice coach, R. Daniel Salyerds. The 18-year-old tenor recalls the moment. “We were in a voice lesson, and it was just one of those small comments he made that he probably didn’t even realize meant so much to me. We were just going through a song, and he said, ‘Andrew, this is absolutely great work. I cannot wait to see what you can do in four years.’ That was our first voice lesson, and just those words made me want to push to be the absolute best I could by the end of my four years, for him and as well as myself.”

For Darling, who favors singing Elaine Hagenberg’s “The Music of Stillness” (text by poet Sara Teasdale) when with a choir, and “Lonely House” from the 1947 opera, Street Scene, when singing solo, the most important part of singing is telling a story and having that story spill into the audience. He states, “Something can sound good, but something will sound even better when the audience can connect to it. That connection is the reason I would say that I do a show, so people walk away saying, ‘That changed my life is.’ I feel like every show, no matter what show it is, has a great message behind it. And it can touch every single person that are in the seats.”