By LANCE FLEMING
Abilene ISD Communications
Abilene High School choir director Wendy Weeks remembers the day she first heard Hope Arrazola sing as part of freshman auditions. It was the fall of 2021, and everyone was wearing masks as part of the district’s COVID mitigation strategy.
Mask or no mask, it was a day Weeks won’t soon forget.
“We had two student teachers take our choir class, and (assistant director) Remel Derrick and I went into a room with all of our freshmen who were auditioning,” Weeks said. “We were all in masks, and when she (Arrazola) came in and auditioned the first time, no one could see it, but both of our jaws just hit the floor.
“Hope tells the story that she remembers seeing me and Mr. Derrick exchanging glances and thinking that she must have been terrible,” Weeks said. “She knew we were acting demonstratively but didn’t know if our reactions were good or bad. When she walked out, we just looked at each other and said, ‘Oh, my word … that voice.’ At that point, we knew the talent she he was something else.”
“That voice” recently helped Arrazola earn her fourth Texas Music Educators’ Association all-state nod, becoming just the fourth student from the Abilene ISD to earn all-state honors in each of their four years in high school. The last student to accomplish the feat was in 2014 by Cooper’s Peter Garza, who is performing on Broadway and has starred in the road production of Hamilton.
Arrazola was selected the state’s second chair Alto 1 this year, earning her third all-state selection in the mixed choir, an honor reserved for the top two singers in the area in each section. The area the Abilene ISD is part of extends from the Panhandle south to Midland/Odessa, west to El Paso, and east as far as Wichita Falls, encompassing all Class 6A and 5A schools in that area.
This year’s first chair honor went to Grace Vareed from Class 4A Canyon High School, who opted to sing “up” for a spot in the Class 6A-5A mixed choir. Arrazola has been an all-state selection in the mixed choir in her freshman, junior, and senior years and was selected to the treble choir as a sophomore. The treble choir takes the next four spots (chairs 3-6) from the area in each section.
Arrazola said her experience in knowing how each level of the contest would be handled – including at the area audition for all-state honors – helped keep her relatively calm before her final audition.
“I didn’t get nervous the day of the audition,” Arrazola said. “I did, though, get nervous sitting in the hotel the night before, just seeing all the people coming into the hotel, and that made it real for me. I get nervous after the audition because I over-think what I’ve done, feel bad, and then shut down.”
However, Arrazola got a perfect score on the sight-reading portion of the contest, giving her a good feeling going into the part of the tryout where she sang the songs selected by TMEA. She felt better about her chances after she heard fellow competitors bemoaning their performance in the sight-reading contest while she had a feeling she aced it.
“I wasn’t nervous,” she said. “After three years of competing, you know when you’ve got it. It wasn’t that I knew I would make all-state choir, but I didn’t feel as nervous because I went in knowing the process and what would happen. It’s weird to say I don’t know how it feels to not make all-state choir; it’s just odd knowing it’s a big deal. But it still hasn’t registered in my brain how big of a deal it is.”
Arrazola, who is playing one of the leads in the Abilene High Theatre production of The Music Man next weekend, will sing in the all-state choir at the TMEA Convention in February. She hopes to take her voice to the University of North Texas to study vocal performance and music education. Weeks has no doubt she’ll make an impact on her college choir, just as she has at Abilene High.
“Her voice has grown in maturity, and she has a hunger for knowledge,” Weeks said of Arrazola. “She’s worked to acquire several other skills. She’s learned the International Phonetic Alphabet. That’s a skill you learn in college if you’re a voice major. However, she began learning it as a sophomore in high school. She sometimes knows some of the rules better than I do because she’s taken to it.
“She’s been inspirational for some of the younger kids in our choir,” Weeks said. “She’s a champion for the TMEA process, and she’s always talking to me about how to get others involved in the contest. She’s always encouraging others and using what she’s learned to make others around her better.”
