Cleveland GLEE Contest

 

In February I heard an announcement on the TV that said, we welcome any local music choirs and choruses to be “Cleveland’s Glee winner”, and that’s all it took.  You see I am a hard core “Glee” fan.  I begged our director to let us participate without knowing many details.  She, the music team, our board of directors and chorus took a leap of faith to take on the challenge.  We submitted our application and we didn’t’ know for two weeks they were only accepting 72 groups from the area.  Once chosen, then we we needed to compete locally against eight other groups, from age high school on up.  Our chorus took a tremendous journey of preparing for the local contest at the annual Cleveland Auto show.  


We competed in the category of acappella, at least we thought so and some of the groups did use background music.  There was a ladies trio, a few high school groups, a college group and a men’s barbershop quartet.  It didn’t matter nothing was going to stop the forces of the Greater Cleveland Chorus that night, we were ready for competition and felt with 48 strong we would fare well…and we did.  Unfortunately, we had to wait until the morning to find out the results that YES we won our “night 8” and we were number 8 of 9 finalists for the event.  Now the really hard work started.  Can you say “techie”?

For 22 days we sent more e-mails and Facebook notices to our friends/family, whoever would listen or read about us to vote for “our chorus” daily than I think collectively we have e-mailed
ourselves out in this lifetime.  The contest short video was on-line and you had to go to a web-site to vote for your favorite.   For our efforts we received third place honors, behind two high school choirs.  Our challengers were more “techie” ready than our friends, I believe we were the oldest collective group in the contest.  Our endeavor was not a loss; it banked us $500 for our efforts, endless comments on the web-site of how well we sang and danced, and it got us some great PR.  Our favorite part was the end posing in the Ford Truck!  Without challenges like that we would never improve our craft and be the chorus we strive to be.

We’d like to thank Cleveland’s Own Fox 8 News, Ford Motor Company and all those aspiring groups and singers who keep pushing us to the brink of greatness.

Respectfully submitted,
Head “Gleek” Dawn Livingstone
Marketing chair for the Greater “Gleeveland” Chorus