On December 10, lunch came with a side of rock.
Frederick High’s School of Rock class gave a memorable performance during both lunches on Tuesday, filling the commons with the sound of drums, keyboard, guitar, and vocals. The vocalists and instrumentalists covered a variety of rock and roll classics over their 30-minute set, including “Burn the Witch” by Queens of the Stone Age, “Zombie” by the Cranberries, “Rebel Yell” by Billy Idol, “Fell on Black Days” by Soundgarden, “Nutshell” by Alice in Chains, “The View from the Afternoon” by Arctic Monkeys, and “Reptillia” by the Strokes.
School of Rock is a performing arts electives class taught and created by Mr. Kyle Liss. The class was designed to give students the skills they’d need to create, perform, and record music in popular music styles like hip-hop, pop, country, and, of course, rock. While one aspect of the class is teaching students how to cover existing songs—which they did during their lunchtime concert—they also learn how to write new music that fits into modern music genres.
“[The students] picked all the music themselves, and they really chose challenging music!” Mr. Liss said. “I thought they did excellent work putting together a long set of hard songs with just about four weeks of class time following our show at the Frederick Tiny Terror Town trunk-or-treat. I was very pleased with the student’s playing and actual performance.”
The lunchtime concerts were a final for the class, who chose not only what songs to perform but to hold the performance at lunch. This was challenging for some of the students who, in their other music classes, perform to silent crowds in dark auditoriums. These performances, however, had to stand out in a loud space where not everyone was paying attention.
“I felt kinda nervous, but when I started playing, I really got into it and felt joy and excitement,” sophomore Orion Freeman said. “Definitely the sound quality was different—the background guitar was overpowering the lead and bass.”
Luckily, the more hesitant students had the more experienced upperclassmen to put them at ease with their confidence. Senior TJ Mogensen said, “I felt great during the performance. I don’t get stage fright so being out and playing with my friends with a crowd was just a fun experience, and I got to build off of their energy.”
A couple of performers weren’t nervous or relaxed—like sophomore Atticus O’Connell, they weren’t thinking at all and were just living in the moment.
“I love performing for any occasion really, but I think this performance was my favorite because I got to perform for my classmates and the people that I go to school with. One song in particular made me kinda nervous due to the way it was sung on my end, but really, I was just focused on the music the whole time.”
While everyone had a great time playing for their peers and rocking out, the concert was a great lesson for the performers, as each could critically evaluate the performance for how they could improve in the future.
Junior Erik Esqueda-LeRoi said that it came down to “the little tiny things that we could do better, like switching between songs faster and being ready to start or more cleanly end a song. But overall, I’m happy with the results of our lunch concert, and I am proud of everyone in our group for giving it their all.”
“Playing at lunch was a cool opportunity,” sophomore Odin Wridt added. “If I were given the chance to change anything about our performance, I would just try to have more fun.”
For one performer, the lunchtime gig was even life-changing. Junior Romero Hall said, “During the performance, I felt really happy to be playing and realized I could have my school experience be positive enough for me to not want to drop out or graduate early. If I had left earlier, I wouldn’t have even realized I could play music like this at school or meet some awesome teachers and students who share the same passion as me.
“This class has let me enjoy school again.”
Something I would change performance wise is to practice having more energy as a group. When we were playing in the parade in Longmont and tiny terror town here in Frederick we kinda seemed dead or like animatronics or something.” He didn’t have any of his own opinions but he did hear back from some other students, and this is what they said, “Some feedback I’ve gotten from students is that the vocals weren’t loud enough or that they were shrieking.”
