McCallie's Guitar Ensemble
Somewhat amazingly, Dr. Michael McCallie, the director of Guitar Programs at McCallie, didn't graduate from the school, instead receiving his high school diploma from Chattanooga Center for Creative Arts before earning college degrees for guitar performance from both Stetson and Yale, then completing his Doctor of Music from Florida State.
But his students sure know how to make the entire McCallie family proud when they pick up their classical guitars.
Not only was McCallie's (the teacher's and the school's) entire Upper School Guitar Ensemble, all 32 of them, the only high school act asked to perform at the opening recital of the Florida Guitar Festival at Florida State's College of Music this past Friday night, but sophomore Stuart Brown came in second in the high school division of the international guitar competition.
"First competition Stuart's ever competed in, and he finishes in second place in the whole shebang," said Dr. McCallie, who's now in his fourth year running the program that Chip Evans started more than 20 years ago.
"I'm so proud of him, but I'm so proud of all of them. In the individual competition there were maybe 20 kids throughout the whole United States and we had four of them. And this is one of the most prestigious and highly competitive events of its kind."
Indeed, while Stuart may have been the only one of the McCallie foursome of junior Jude Rifai, sophomore Sid Cheemakoti, sophomore Colin Sanders and Brown to reach the four-person final round, all four turned in outstanding efforts.
"I was kind of surprised since it was my first competition," said Stuart, who also runs track, wants to be an engineer one day and counts Jason Vieaux as his favorite classical guitarist and John Mayer as his favorite rock guitarist. "I've been playing for nine years, six years on classical guitar. I thought we all played pretty well."
Dr. McCallie concurred, both on the ensemble as a whole and his individual performers, noting, "We got glowing reviews from the harshest critics."
The next chance for the McCallie community to experience such glowing classical guitar performances from the Upper School Guitar Ensemble will come in Sunday's Fall Student Recital at 3 p.m. in the Chapel (both solo and ensemble), then during Candlelight on Friday, Dec. 2, and Saturday, Dec. 3.