The Whitman College Choral Contest has been part of campus tradition for 85 years since its conception in 1925.
The year 2009 saw a twist to this campus staple with the introduction of the Peoples Choice Awardor, as it is officially known, the David W. Ogle Award for Proficiency in the Field of Creative Musical and Lyrical Composition with Outstanding Mastery and Demonstration of Imaginative and Entertaining Medium through Performance. According to its Web site, New York-based SFT is a non-profit founded in 1994 that strives to make life difficult for the Chinese government and raise awareness about human rights issues in Tibet. Through the Peoples Choice Award, the Betas raised two boxes of food and over $100 for SFT. The Betas worked hard on their musical pieces, but had fun along the way. Im really proud of how hard the guys worked, they really came together to produce such an angelic tenor, said junior Marshall Baker, conductor and arranger of the Beta Theta Pi production. I dont really have much to say other than My name is Kid Rock. But really, I mean, it was fun and sweet to win finally, said senior Riley Clubb, who helped Baker with the award winning arrangement. The Peoples Choice Award is the brainchild of senior David Ogle. Ogle, along with senior Ben Keagan, sophomore Nigel Ramoz-Leslie and first-year Stephen Stradley, comprise the programming board sub-committee that proposed the idea of having a Peoples Choice Award. The programming committee was divided into four or five sub-committees to take care of Choral Contest. My sub-committee, which came up with the idea [of a Peoples Choice Award] deals with rules and judges. Once we came up with it, the idea was instantly supported by the rest of the programming committee, said Ogle.
The Peoples Choice Award added a dynamic element to the show by involving the audience.