The upbeat lyrical notes fly through the air. He stands with the other members of the acapella with his controlled voice swiftly gliding up and down his tenor range. He looks out to the audience, swaying to the beat of a familiar song. Behind the scenes, Aidan Abramson’s hours of singing till he knew the song forward and backward shines through.
Abramson performs with the All-state Large School Mixed Choir on Feb. 12 in San Antonio. He is part of the top 1% of all 6A and 5A choir students in Texas.
“I was both glad and a little bit surprised because I don’t think that it was my best audition of the series, but it was definitely exciting,” Abramson said.
Last year, Abramson qualified for the all-state choir as well, but the convention in San Antonio was canceled because of COVID-19.
“They had it on Zoom, and I didn’t really want to do it,” Abramson said. “Knowing this year that I made it again, I’m able to go perform with the Mixed Choir. It’s a really cool thing, and it’s a four day long rehearsal and then you have the concert on Saturday. I’m really excited about that.”
Abramson spent multiple months preparing and then auditioning through region, pre-area where he was first chair and then area at A&M Commerce. About five to eight students make the Tenor Bass Choir and about one to five make the All-State Mixed Choir.
“It gets pretty difficult because you have to learn these classical pieces and a lot of them are rhythmically challenging and pitch challenging,” Abramson said. “It gets more and more selective and the music gets more and more difficult as it goes on.”
While Abramson prepared for these auditions, he learned three pieces of classical music for each step with help from his private voice lessons outside of school. Abramson meets with his voice teacher every Sunday.
“I go for an hour, and we [his voice teacher and him] work on that music,” Abramson said. “We also work on college audition music and sometimes a cappella music if that’s something that I need help with. It’s a lot of work outside of school that a lot of people don’t know about. It’s definitely hard work, and it’s tedious sometimes. It makes it worth it to know that I’ve made it here.”
When Abramson joined choir in sixth grade, he “wasn’t huge on choir.” However, the solo he received after auditioning for the Disney Spectacular show changed his perspective.
“The positive feedback made me fall in love with choir, and I realized that I can be the music,” Abramson said. “I don’t have to worry about what my friends think about me because they’re going to be supportive. It’s been a learning experience since then knowing that I can be who I want to be. It flipped the switch.”
After Abramson realized that tenor one was a little too high for him as he almost injured his voice last year, he switched to tenor two. Now, Abramson has learned exercises to maintain a healthy voice such as drinking water, warming up properly, doing stretches in the neck.
“We actually got to the point where we thought I might have nodes, which was a scary moment,” Abramson said. “I had to go through a bunch of myofascial release therapy. They do little massages on your neck to ease up tension in your vocal folds. I was constantly singing in a register that I didn’t know how to healthily sing at. It turns out we didn’t have them [nodes].”
For Abramson’s senior project, he performed a live music gig at Napoli’s Restaurant where he used to work. Abramson has sung country covers of Luke Brian, Parker McCollum and other country artists with his acoustic guitar that he learned how to play through COVID-19. He plans to write his own music going into college.
“I got my two monitors and a mixing board that I can travel to restaurants with,” Abramson said. “That’s something I look forward to doing. I’m going to try to start doing that more. For my project, my sister’s boyfriend ended up streaming me playing on Reddit. We got 180,000 viewers, which was really cool.”
Ryder Sullivan, his fellow a capella singer, shares his thoughts on Abramson’s achievement.
“I’m really proud of him,” Sullivan said. “I know he is a very hardworking and dedicated person. He deserves to get into the choir. I think he will do really well and will succeed. I can’t wait to see how he does and what the experience is like for him.”
Abramson is still deciding if he will major in music or in biomedical engineering next year.
“I have to decide which path I want to follow,” Abramson said. “If I want to go somewhere for music and then internally transfer to engineering, but regardless I look forward to auditioning for different choirs there that don’t require a major in music. Even if I do engineering, I want to be doing choir as well.”
The choir director Cathy Koziatek has watched Abramson grow as a musician these last four years.
“He’s sort of the rock of our choir program because he really gets it,” Koziatek said. “He’s such a great musician. Mrs. D’Souza and I can give some instruction. He writes it in his music, and then he’ll perform it just the way we want it everytime. Musically he rises to the top. It’s not an accident. He works hard to be that way.”
