At this year’s A Cappella Fest on March 30 and March 31, performers switched things up by singing and dancing to new tunes.

According to sophomore Kayla Montero, a singer in Note-a-fy, Note-a-fy sang “Dark Fantasy” by Kanye West, “Your Love Is My Drug” by Ke$ha and “My Heart With You” by The Rescues. Note-a-fy learned all three songs just this year.

“We all like the old songs that we do, but I feel like the audience might find it a bit boring for us to do our old songs rather than bring something new,” said Montero. “It was one of our goals to have new songs so that people would think that Note-a-fy’s still really good, rather than just slacking off redoing songs.”

When Montero joined Note-a-fy as a freshman, she said that she looked forward to the musical arrangement aspect of the group, but in reality the group did very little new arranging then and stuck to old favorites like “Valerie” by Amy Winehouse.

“Our main goal for this year was to do more new songs rather than teach old songs that have been passed down from other Note-a-fy members, and I think we accomplished the goal,” said Montero.

Like Note-a-fy, the Testostatones also learned new pieces specifically for A Cappella Fest.

Testostatones sang “Down on the Corner” by Creedence Clearwater Revival and “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison, both arranged by music teacher Michael Driscoll, and a different third song in each show.

“We always like to challenge ourselves and add as many new songs to our repertoire as we can,” senior Nick Page said.

Armed with new songs, Page said the Testostatones pointed their attention to preparation.

“For the past three weeks, we’ve been really been focusing on perfecting our repertoire so that we can have a really fine-tuned musical performance as well as a high energy performance that will keep the crowd going.”

Perfect Pitch, according to sophomore Emy Metzger, also has strayed away from older songs and has even added choreography to their performance.

They sang “Oops! … I Did It Again” by Britney Spears and “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by Michaelson, both of which were arranged by sophomore Jordan Underwood, along with “Galileo” by the Indigo Girls.

“‘Oops!… I Did It Again’ was definitely a challenge, and it’s really interesting to see what the group can do,” Metzger said. “We thought we’d never be able to do it, and what ended up happening was we ended up learning it, and we ended up adding choreography.”

Like Note-a-fy and the Testostatones, Perfect Pitch has also taken on the challenge of learning new songs.

Metzger emphasized the importance of the new songs to more than just the individuals in the group.

“We’ve been recycling songs a lot in the past,” Metzger said. “Last year, we had two new songs and this year almost every single song we’ve performed has been new. New songs are fun to learn. The audience wants to hear new songs.”

Anna Parkhurst can be contacted at [email protected].