For the third consecutive year, the varsity guitar ensemble took first place in The Hill Country Classical Guitar Ensemble Festival and Competition on March 28 and 29. The junior varsity ensemble placed fourth, their first time placing at the contest since first competing in it.

The annual contest, held at Texas State University in San Marcos, featured guitar ensembles, quartets and trios from high schools across Texas.

The varsity guitar team is usually reserved for students who have been in the program for at least two years, as they typically progress through the beginner and junior varsity levels first.

However, this year, sophomore Shiraz Alapat and freshman Aldric Tanzil joined and performed with the varsity ensemble. They also played in a quartet with two upperclassmen and won second place.

“It was really a privilege for me to be able to do that,” Alapat said. “I was really surprised when they told me that they wanted me to do it with them. I thought they were definitely gonna ask another upperclassman, but when they asked me, I thought, ‘Okay, I can do this. If they think I can do it, then I can.’”

To prepare for the competition, Alapat and Tanzil spent time in class practicing with the rest of the large ensemble and hours a day practicing with their other quartet members, often sacrificing extracurriculars and time to do homework or be around friends.

“We practiced so much,” Alapat said. “We skipped every lunch [and practiced] after school. On the day before we left, we skipped almost all of our classes. We practiced so much that I wasn’t too worried about us messing up, because I knew we had it down.”

Tanzil’s experience performing in the competition and preparing for it motivates him to push himself as a player. In the future, he wants to look for opportunities to win awards and improve.

“I wasn’t too confident as a player before the quartet, but them asking me to be in it gave me a lot more confidence in myself,” he said. “I just want to become the best player that I can.”

While the varsity guitar group has won the Hill Country competition in the last two years, the 2025 competition presented some obstacles and challenges.

“One problem was that each part was kind of on their own the whole year until the trip,” senior Elizabeth Nguyen said. “It just felt like we didn’t really know what the other parts were doing and didn’t really know how to play together as if every part was doing their own thing.”

Despite the lack of synergy between Bellaire guitarists prior to the competition, Nguyen said that the ensemble spending time together on the day of the contest built up adrenaline and allowed every individual player to become one ensemble, even more so than in previous years.

“We’re more of a team this time,” Nguyen said. “Being in the same hotel together and meeting up at certain areas and playing the whole day together, everything really brought us closer together.”

The Bellaire ensemble played three pieces: “Concerto for Strings in G Major,” composed by Vivaldi and arranged for guitar, “Nebulae” by American composer Olga Almekina-Vera and a tango written by English composer Mark Houghton.

“The Vivaldi piece was the piece that we were least confident in,” Tanzil said. “I was a little bit worried about that one, but after each piece, I think my confidence kept going up. We played each piece better and better after the other.”

The Vivaldi concerto was a challenge for the ensemble in that they started to learn it just a few weeks before the competition, compared to the months of preparation they had to refine the other two pieces. Additionally, the group played it faster than anticipated on the day of the contest.

“When we first rehearsed right before the performance, I felt it was a lot quicker than it usually was, and that kind of scared me,” Nguyen said. “But I feel like just because we had that extra piece and the judges didn’t have much to say about it, I feel like that helped us more than damaged us.”

The festival part of the event featured guest performances from the Ibison Guitar Duo and Michael Kelsey. The Ibison duo performed classical pieces while Kelsey had a more unique performance, using an acoustic guitar and improvising his own songs.

“There was just so much unique stuff that he was able to do,” Alapat said. “And the percussion he was doing as well, and also singing and making up a song on the fly looked very impressive.”
Guitar students talked to the guest performers after their concerts. They could ask them questions about their pieces and look for ways to improve as guitarists. Alapat received advice on optimizing his harmonics, which are bell-like sounds produced by lightly touching and playing the guitar string at certain points.

“[The Ibison duo] told me when you’re playing a harmonic, you should move your left hand away from the string, away from the direction that you’re playing with your right hand,” Alapat said. “I had never learned that before. No one ever taught me that.”

The varsity guitar program will compete next at the Texas State UIL Solo and Small Ensemble Competition on May 24 at the University of Texas at Austin.