Photo taken by Eleanor Sananman
The Muses, a new, all-girls singing group at Lick, is led by juniors Jacqueline Blaska, Eva Krukowski, and Carly Steyer. On Sunday, January 26th, the PT Online staff interviewed Jacqueline and Eva about their experience in starting the group as they anticipated their first public performance at Community Meeting the next day.
The questions asked in the interview were omitted in the article,as the words come solely from the Muses and what they have to say about their new group.
Jacqueline: There are 10 of us right now, we have three first sopranos– me, Carson Kraft, and Sophia Sinsheimer. Our second sopranos are Isabel Povey, Clara Liang, Ainsley Dankort, and Audrey Sorem-Smikle. Our altos are Eva Krukowski, Caitlin Yu, and Carly Steyer.
Eva: I really wanted a chance to sing outside of chorus, but in school, in an environment where we have more freedom and leadership, with a repertoire we could pick.
At the beginning of the year, we were talking about it and someone said “we should start (a singing group)”.
J: It really started as kind of a joke, but then we said, “wait, we actually should”.
We realized a bunch of us were all passionate, and interested, we all enjoyed music and singing together– we thought, why not?
Our goal in this was, first of all, to give the women of Lick-Wilmerding a chance to sing together outside the classroom environment, and also to bring this element of female empowerment. So much of the music industry now is very objectifying or sexualizing of women, and so in picking songs by female artists who are empowered and who have great lyrics that speak to the messages we believe in, we’re empowering ourselves and the Lick community.
E: We’re doing an event sometime this spring, we will be performing at one of LWOW’s future performances, the Monologues. We’re planning on two more formal performances after Monday’s community meeting, where we will perform at the Aim High Showcase, and at Girl Talk.
J: Hopefully in future years, our goal would be to do a bigger performance, charging money for tickets, and donate it to La Casa de las Madres, or another one of the women’s groups in San Francisco.
J: What’s great about the Muses is that we’re from different grades, friend groups, levels of experience and musical backgrounds, and what I have enjoyed has been getting to know people who I wouldn’t have necessarily been able to before this. We have really come together as a group.
E: In terms of arranging, we do it collectively, so “Royals” took a long time– people underestimate how hard it actually is coordinate a group like this.
J: We knew we wanted to do our own arrangement, and overall, “Royals” was one hundred percent us. And it wasn’t just Eva, or just Carly, or me, it was everyone. At one point this fall there was one harmony that we could just not get, and Isabel and Clara showed up at one rehearsal saying “we figured it out”. The two youngest members of the Muses totally blew us out of the water.
There’s a certain kind of ownership with arranging our own music, an element to it that’s very us as a group.
Next year, we’re going to lost two of our members. We’ll hold auditions in the beginning of the year, people will be able to sign up, it will be pretty informal. We want to thank the Lick-Wilmerding community for their support of all of us, we really hope it stays at Lick, and stays this close as a group.
