So Quartz Mountain was incredible. It was two weeks of tedious rehearsal, bad cafeteria food, refreshing morning classes in yoga and kick boxing, a strenuous mountain climb, late night silliness in the dorm, of adventures with new friends, most of which you can't believe you haven't known your whole life, of performances every night by nationally acclaimed artists and instructors.
The first week wasn't too hard at all. I was stressed the first day cause I felt pressured to get settled in and make a few friends and I was paranoid about being late for something. Soon everything started to become habit, I pretty much memorized the schedule and got used to lugging my music around and keeping up with a room key. I loved our first week conductor, Dr. David L. Brunner.
He was so much fun, and very encouraging. I wished I'd prepared the music a little more thoroughly, but it really was fine.
Almost every night there was an optional Conversation where a faculty person would tell about themselves and answer questions, and a required Performance by another faculty member. There were so many amazing people. I loved the creative writing instructor George Bilgere. Here are a couple of his rocking poems:
The Table
Unwise Purchases
Click here to listen to a recording of George reading some of his poetry for us.
My favorite was the percussion instructor, Valerie Naranjo. She is a totally and completely amazing lady and an incredible performer. The first time she sat down to play the gyli (african marimba), and sang beautiful tribal songs I was hooked. She played about every other day for us, and we never got tired of hearing her. She taught us to sing along with her, and there was not a soul who didn't feel like jumping up and leaping around.
Of course we also got to see performances by all the students. The ballet and modern dance was brilliant!!! One of my three roommates was a ballet student. The other two were orchestra. I probably made more orchestra friends than anything else, though of course I had choir friends and two awesome girls from Creative Writing. Didn't really know people from any other discipline.
We all decided amongst ourselves that they should let us pick one or two other disciplines that we were interested in and give us an afternoon of classes cause we were all insanely curious to know what each other did. Personally, I would pick photography or modern dance.
Our first performance went very well. It was combined with the orchestra concert so we had to sit backstage and didn't get to hear them at all. 
Our second week conductor was Dr. Pearl Shangkuan. I was quite scared of her at first but at the end we all loved her and pretty much decided she was a SuperNinja at night. 
She can be very fierce for such a tiny lady but she knows what she wants and insisted we all work our bottoms off. She told us at the beginning fo the first rehearsal that we had to have every note and rhythm down by the end of that first day and that we would drop score on four pieces by the fourth day.
Memorizing those four pieces didn't turn out to be so hard as I thought. Well, one of them was a pain in the rear, but the point of the whole camp was to challenge ourselves, so it's not like we could complain.
Anyway we had many adventures. We were transported by bus to a nearby community college for rehearsal two days in a row. Not terribly fun. The room smelled funny and the sandwiches for lunch tasted funnier. Even worse, the bus only held 40 and there were 54 of us.
Of course not everyone took advantage of the opportunities at this camp. Three kids got sent home for smoking pot. That's a bummer. Overall though it was so so so cool to spend two weeks around 274 other people who loved their discipline and were totally focused on it. Some of those creative writing people were really intense - even if they did get to spend many hours a day laying out by the lake to do their writing.
These are some of the songs we sang, but they are just YouTube recordings, not us actually singing them. There were several really interesting pieces I couldn't find.
"Duerme Negrito" Boy I really didn't like this song.
"Ave Verum Corpus," William Byrd. Loved this one
"Gamelan" Oh the pain. The most frustrating piece we did over both weeks. Caused my tongue to become dislocated from my body
"Sanctus," Leonard Bernstein. This one was pretty fun. We didn't take it this fast though
"Danny Boy," Joseph Flummerfelt. I don't need to tell you how much we loved it. It was harder to get the nuances right than I expected
"Dravidian Dithyramb" This is one we had to memorize. Oh, and we did it on na na, as in nanny nanny boo boo, as opposed to nah nah.
"Amor De Mi Alma," Z. Randall Stroope. My favorite from the first week's pieces. So beautiful. And we did it way better then them.
"Liebeslieder Waltzes, 9 and 10," Brahms. We did 8, 9 and 11 I believe. We didn't have enough time to do the German diction for 10 and 12. The people on this video do their German differently than we did ours...
Movements 11 and 12. Again, we did not perform 12
"Ain't No Grave," Sean Ivory, Paul Caldwell. Ours was way cooler.
They pronounce too many consanants here. We had a little more fun and sang it more like a traditional spiritual. I will never forget the first time we came together to sing this piece in rehearsal after learning the work in sectionals. We were all really hyper and pretty much blasted the roof off the auditorium. It gave us goose bumps."Son de Camaguey," Hatfield. This was an audience favorite. Dang the ending was hard. :-I
"I am in Need of Music," David Brunner. This wasn't my favorite, but it was pretty easy and nice to listen to. It was interesting to do our conductor's own piece
This is an African Marimba called a gyli. Valerie played this for us with soft mallets acutally and not sticks.
Sooooo if you're still alive, I'll post some pictures sometime later.
