Six schools and 209 students performed at HISD’s annual All-City Guitar Festival at Bellaire on Saturday. Elementary, middle and high school students played a variety of songs that they’ve learned over the year. The program started in the auditorium at 1:30 p.m. and ended at 3:30 p.m..

Eleven ensembles performed two songs each, with a total performance duration of 10 minutes per ensemble. Songs varied from Meyerland Performing and Visual Arts Middle School’s “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga to Pin Oak Middle School’s “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears For Fears.
Meyerland PVA Guitar Ensemble director Daniel Flutur said that he always “loved” coming to the All-City Guitar Festival.

“It’s great to be able to not only perform and show off everything that we’ve been doing throughout the year to all the other schools, but to actually hear what all the other schools are doing,” Flutur said. “[My students have] enjoyed listening and hearing the different things that other schools are doing, too.”

To prepare for performances like these, Flutur said he and his students focus on the details of “really making music.”

“We spend a lot of time just drilling our music, working on musicality,” Flutur said. “At the end of the day, that’s really what we’re always focused on. I really try to instill in them a sense of music being more than just notes on the piece of paper. It has to be human beings understanding it, interpreting it and expressing it.”

Varsity guitar player and sophomore Shiraz Alapat attended this event during his freshman year.

“I thought it was really fun, but I think I missed out because I didn’t join one of the all-city groups and instead did this challenge where you have to learn one piece in the time allotted, which wasn’t as fun as being in one of the all-city groups was,” Alapat said. “This time, I’m glad I picked to be in tier one [the most difficult tier out of three] and play for that.”

Playing a piece called “Nebula,” Alapat said that varsity guitar students have been working on the piece all year.

“This piece is really difficult because it has a lot of time signatures and weird rhythms like quintuplets, and that makes it [hard] to play,” Alapat said. “We rehearse in class often, and we also have a website called Noteflight, which takes all the sheet music and keeps it online so you can listen to recordings there and play along with it at home.”

Junior varsity guitar player and freshman Marcus Talan performed three songs for junior varsity and started playing guitar six years ago.

“We help each other one-on-one to prepare for a performance before the event, and we take the entire time to perform as much as possible and make sure we make this song as great as we can,” Talan said. “Everybody in the guitar team is awesome, and everyone should try out guitar. It’s a really amazing community and I love it.”

For more information about guitar performances, activities or more, contact director Edward Grigassy at @[email protected].