The Oak Park High School music department held their first concert of the year, Music at the Movies, last week on Oct. 8 and 9. Music at the Movies is an event unique to OPHS. As its name suggests, it features a concert program made up entirely of film scores and soundtracks.

Music at the Movies hasn’t always been around. Originally, it was a standard fall concert, but this changed around 10 years ago.

“We had done a soundtrack recording session workshop at Disneyland a couple years in a row, back in 2015 or ‘16, and it inspired us to do a movie-themed concert,” band teacher Zachary Borquez said. “There [were] some parents at the time who were interested in helping make it happen. And so we went for it and it stuck. We’ve done [Music at the Movies] ever since.”

During these concerts, clips from the featured movies roll in the background. The student musicians perform the pieces accompanying these visuals, giving the audience the impression of “watching a bunch of mini movies,” Borquez said.

“Usually, the audiences are kind of in awe,” Borquez said. “Typically what they’ll report is that they forget that it’s actually live student musicians that they’re listening to. The biggest compliment is, ‘I forgot they were playing. I was just enthralled in what I was watching and listening to the beautiful music.’ That means we did our job.”

Every year, the public relations team undertakes a particularly fun task: creating parody movie posters from the featured films, which are typically meant to be humorously low quality to promote the concert.

“This tradition has been around for a while, and we just photoshop ensemble members onto the movie posters,” junior and public relations manager Sophie Bi said. “Some of them end up really silly, and the posters are printed out and sold during the concert.”

Though traditions persist, OPHS’s music program has had some developments during recent years. The program now provides concert attire–dresses and tuxedos–for students, allowing the music groups to appear uniform on stage. Additionally, the OPHS choir began participating in the Music at the Movies concert a few years ago.

“We’re building up a library of [choir repertoire],” Borquez said. “It’s always exciting to see each new year the slew of new choir tunes that we will have moving forward into the future.”

The biggest change this year is the introduction of a new strings group. Since the arrival of the strings program at OPHS, there has only been one ensemble: String Orchestra, but it has since split to include a more advanced Chamber Orchestra.

“I’m excited that we have a new strings group and the band gets to play with them,” Morais said. “We’ve been practicing together for the first time ever, so everyone’s really excited to play at a higher level [this year] than we ever have before.”

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OPHS Wind Ensemble seniors. (Photo by William Tang/The Eagle)

Since the start of the year, all ensembles have focused on refining their pieces and strengthening fundamental music skills. To members of OPHS’s music department, the ultimate goal is always something to look forward to: performance.

“Each performance is experience towards being more comfortable playing in front of an audience and on stage, and ultimately with that confidence comes a higher level of performance in the future,” Borquez said.

Camaraderie plays a key role across band, strings and choir. Senior and strings program representative Anastasiia Maksimova can attest to this sense of community.

“[The best part of the program is] having other people who know the craft and playing music together, and working together to make that music work. It’s about learning music with other people and making friends.”