Choirs, orchestras, and the Vespers: the rest of the school's music

MISHAWAKA HIGH AND MARIAN · THE VOCAL AND STRING RECORD AT DOCUMENTED SIZE

The band's record is the loud half of the school's music; the other half sings. Mishawaka High's choir program stands in the present record as three ensembles — Concert Choir, Chamber Choir and Treble Choir — under a published mission of "musical skills and expression through music reading skills and vocal technique," competing as the bands do: the choirs' own page records the 2024–25 singers at the ISSMA Organizational Festival of 26 April 2025 at Northridge High School, the Concert Choir taking a Gold rating in Group III. The school's orchestras keep a named tradition of their own: the Vespers concert, a December fixture joining orchestra and choir in the school auditorium — the orchestra program's page for the season carries the Vespers rehearsals, the combined winter concert, and the pit orchestra for the school's musical (in the current season, Chicago: Teen Edition), the string players doing duty in the pit as their 1924 predecessors did at the dances. The line from Miss Winn's forty pieces to the present department is unbroken in kind if not yet in personnel: a school that teaches appreciation, chorus, glee club and orchestra in 1930 teaches concert, chamber and treble choirs, three bands, a jazz ensemble and two orchestras a century on, and the state's festival system grades all of it in public.

Marian High School, the Catholic school the Sisters of St. Francis founded in 1964, carries music at the smaller school's documented size: a band of pep and concert sections, no marching band as of the school's published account of April 2015, competing annually in the ISSMA competitions and holding the two fixed points of the small-school music year, a Christmas concert and a Spring concert. Its choirs stand in the Schools record at that record's size; what this section adds is only the standing fact that both of the city's high schools keep rated, competing ensembles, and that between them the school's music room — not a society, not a hall — remained Mishawaka's conservatory for the whole century the record covers.

Sources:

1. Mishawaka High School Choirs (the choirs' own site, read November 2026) — the three ensembles, the mission statement, the ISSMA Organizational Festival of 26 April 2025 and the Concert Choir's Gold in Group III.
2. Mishawaka Orchestras (the orchestra program's site) — the Vespers concert of December, the combined Orchestra/Choir winter concert, the pit orchestra for the school musical.
3. Marian High School (Mishawaka), school article record — the pep and concert band, ISSMA competition, Christmas and Spring concerts, no marching band as of April 2015; the Schools record of this history for the school whole.