Song Fest Competition 2017

Reported by ELC

    Congratulations to all students who took part in the Song Fest Competition for the second consecutive year. It was indeed a moment full of  anticipation. Three best classes from each Junior level were selected to compete in the finals which was held on the 11th of April 2017.

    The Song Fest Competition was solely organised for Junior level classes which provided an enriching singing and educational experience for all teams as students were given a platform to create, compose and cleverly present their songs on stage. Students earnestly and enthusiastically participated in the competition which displayed an active participation from all junior classes. Teachers together with their team of students brainstormed and collaborated to produce an outstanding performance to attract the judges in order to get the highest score by displaying a range of variation in their singing.

    The song selected could be based on a famous tune of any genre with self-composed lyrics. The song could  be presented in the form of acapella with any props rather than musical instruments to produce sound effects. Judging was carried out according to creativity, originality, lyrics (content and expressions), rhythm and tempo, and lastly, the wow factor. While waiting for the winners to be announced, the audience was kept engaged with  a video from the “Not Quite Right Competition” organised by Sunway University where a team of Hin Hua High School students emerged as Champions in 2015. This definitely kept the audience entertained as it was rather funny and filled with excitement.

    The judges for the competition were Ms.Alice Ong who was the chief judge, Ms. Prem and Ms. Suchatra. Ms. Alice Ong was a former English teacher at Hin Hua High School with a whole lot of experience and knowledge in the music field. Ms. Alice applauded and appreciated the singing talent of the students in her comments. She also said that the students demonstrated talent, determination and team spirit  in staging their performances as acapella or even composing a song is not an easy task for young learners. Ms. Alice suggested some areas of improvement for the participants where she commented that the teams need to work more on having good eye contact with the conductor while on stage. Another aspect to ponder for the participants was that the drumming and beating of equipment overpowered the singers’ vocal projection.

    Finally she concluded by saying all teams had staged a brilliant performance, but there could only be one winner. Ms. Alice announced the winners and Madam Boo, the Vice-principal and Head of the English Language Centre , gave away the prizes to the winning classes.

Song fest Champion

Joshua Lim (J3 Chicago)

    This Songfest has been especially meaningful to my class, Junior Three Chicago. This year, we made it our goal to emerge the champion in this competition, and we managed to do so. We have practiced long and hard for this competition whenever we were allowed to by our teacher, Ms Mano. It was quite a challenge to plan the song as we had to collect opinions and ideas from everyone, but we did it anyway. As the conductor, I think that we had put on our best performance ever in the competition itself, and that every one of us put our heart and soul into it. This Songfest has served to bond us closer together as a class, along with the exultation of winning the champion’s trophy together.

Second Prize Winner

Chuah Jing Wen  (J2 Toronto)

      Song Fest is organized once a year in our school. We waited so anxiously for this competition. Every year, our English teacher will help us with our song lyrics, movements and others to win the competition. During the song fest, we learned something that we cannot learn in our textbooks, that is team spirit. We realize to win this competition, we need to put in a lot of effort, time and the most importantly cooperation from all classmates. A lot of classes got eliminated in the preliminary stage and only nine classes got into the final competition. During the final, we felt nervous but we believed that we can win because our performance was more creative than other teams. We felt very excited when our class was announced as the winner for the second place and we felt that our effort was worthwhile. It was  a great experience and we would like to thank our beloved English teacher, Ms Renuga, for her motivation and support. Without her, we would not have succeeded in this song fest. Thanks again to Ms Renuga.

Best Conductor

Matthew Ng Shen Hao (J2 Toronto)

    I feel very honoured to be selected as the best conductor, and our class also won the second prize. At the beginning our practice  did not go smoothly but with everyone's cooperation we managed to practice a few times. Like the saying goes 'practice makes perfect'. I also thought that our lyrics was meaningful where we appreciated the 70 years of Hin Hua High School.  As a conductor the most important thing was to guide the students with the beat and facial expressions correctly. If the performance of the conductor is bad it affects the whole team. Finally, I would like to thank Ms Renuga for giving us enough time to practice and also thanks to all my classmates for their cooperation. I hope next year we will be the champion.