Junior Jack Dooley said his class practices every day in class for their Metro West conference performance.

“(We do) a lot of practice,” Dooley said.“We don’t have a dress rehearsal with the entire group so that’s kind of tricky, but every day in class we go over the music.”

Sophomore Abby Intveld said they will go to Benilde-St. Margaret’s in order to share their music to the rest of the Metro West conference.

“We have conference at Benilde next Wednesday (Feb. 8),” Intveld said.“We’re basically just showing our songs to everyone, to multiple schools. It’ll be a small concert to show other schools what we can do, basically.”

Orchestra director Miriam Edgar said conference is a meeting between all the orchestra programs in the Metro West in order to improve their respective pieces.

“The Metro West conference is our conference that is like all of our sports teams and arts and they choose which schools we get to participate with and events that are connected with each school,” Edgar said.

Edgar said the orchestra will play in a clinic in order to get a professional perspective.

“So what this event specifically is where all the orchestra programs in our conference get together and then the conference actually pays for a clinician,” Edgar said. “The clinician comes and works with each orchestra. It’s not only an opportunity for us to work with each clinician but also to connect with the other orchestra programs and maybe hear other music and can get ideas.”

Sophomore Sidney Hosfield said the orchestra will also be judged on their performance.

“We’re going to play some songs that we’ve been working on and we have judges and I think they just rank us from best to worst,” Hosfield said.

Edgar said she is excited about the prospect of playing the music from their upcoming rock concert rather than their usual orchestral pieces.

“We have our rock concert coming up and this year we will be playing some of our rock music, which I think is a good thing because usually we play our usual classical music,” Edgar said.“It’s kind of fun to be able to go to a different school. It is a conservative school so I’m going to have to check the lyrics to make sure we aren’t offending any of the people we will be performing for at this school. I think it’ll be really fun.”

Edgar said after their conference they’ll have many more chances to practice their music before their rock concert.

“The nice thing is we’ll get feedback on our music,” Edgar said.“Then after that will be our first rehearsal with the rock band that’s coming in and we’ll be able to brush up our music.”

Dooley said the conference also works as a chance to have professionals observe and critique their playing.

“It’s like a master class almost,” Dooley said.“It’s like we’ll play and then a professional will say ‘Oh here’s what’s wrong. Fix it.’ So that’ll be cool.”

Hosfield said she believes they will perform well.

“We’re pretty good and we’ve been practicing (for) a long time,” Hosfield said.“(We have been practicing) a couple months. We’ll be fine.”

As director, Edgar said she hopes continually performing will help the orchestra make connections with the other orchestras in the West Metro.

“I think one of the biggest hopes that I’ve seen over the past couple of years is to build connections with the other orchestra directors in the metro area, specifically the west Metro area,” Edgar said.“When I first started it was really isolating, so I think being able to make these connections greatly benefits us.”