Music

Glee Club is Ursuline's non-auditioned chorus group open to students of all grade levels. Glee Club is full of music and full of fun!

Choral Group is an audition-based chorus open to students in grades 9 - 12. They sing at all Masses and school events. Additionally, they participate annually in the MICCA Festival and perform at many outside concerts, events, and celebrations. 

The Bearitones is our student-run a capella group. Students participate in jams with other high school a capella teams, they sing at the Ursuline concerts, and they host the spring fundraiser, Taylor Made, that raises funds for the Taylor Manning '17 Scholarship.

Chamber Ensemble is a classical instrumental group in partnership with St. Sebastian's School, a neighboring all boys' school. They perform a wide repertoire of music including classical, jazz, and contemporary works at the Christmas Concert and the Festival of the Arts. 

Psalm 98 is our liturgical musician group. Psalm 98 accompanies the Choral Group in performance during school Masses and prayer services throughout the year.

In this course, students will learn to be participants and listeners through an introduction to sheet music, percussion instruments, and vocal performance. Students will be encouraged to read and play rhythmic compositions, to work on keeping a steady beat, and reading and notating rhythms. They will be introduced to composition and arranging through the study of rhythm. Students study music from the Western European Common Practice as well as Jazz and music from the modern age; they will learn to analyze and critique these selections. 

In this course, students advance their musical competence by learning new time signatures, simple key signatures, and chords in major and minor keys. They use this information to compose a melody for xylophone or keyboard and accompany that melody on the ukulele. Students learn to play the varied repertoire of songs for the ukulele and put together a 'band' performance as their final assessment. As they listen to music, they continue to use their music vocabulary to analyze, describe, and evaluate performances from all eras and genres. 

While music is universally embraced as a human language, Ursuline students learn how to interpret that language through technical understanding. Students focus on time signatures, rhythm, understanding intervals, key signatures - major and minor, and harmony. Additionally students engage in ear-training, which includes interval recognition, rhythmic and melodic dictation, chord progressions, and cadences. Students' culminating activities include two original compositions. 

In this course, students follow the curriculum as set by the College Board and may earn college credit through the Advanced Placement (AP) exam taken in the spring. Students learn to recognize, understand, and describe the basic materials and processes of music. This course encourages students to develop skills by listening to, reading, writing, and performing a wide variety of music. Coursework includes musical concepts including pitch, interval, scales, keys, chords, meter, and rhythm. This course develops skills including singing a notated melody on sight, notating music by ear, and completing music based on cues, following common-practice style. 

In this course, students will be introduced to the benefits of choral singing by learning a variety of pieces taken from two, three, and four part (SSAA) choral literature for women's and treble choirs encompassing many historical and cultural periods. This course will focus on vocal techniques, good tone production, diction, posture, healthy singing, and excellent breath support. With these skills and an emphasis on reading music notation and sight-singing, students will learn to express feelings and emotions that words alone cannot.