If you have any sort of choir relationship, you know that there is a sort of hierarchy to the group. Each group or individual singer will stray from the main idea, but a lot of trends carry out truthfully. Most of the sections get to have really cool melodies, without having to search them (looking at you, sopranos) What I mean is that in almost any piece of music, it is guaranteed that the sopranos will have the main melody for at least a portion of the song. But being an alto is a little bit different, and here are some reasons why.

Being an alto means that you are pretty much guaranteed to sing the same note over and over again for the harmonious parts. Most commonly, these notes are in the range of "D" to "A" above Middle C. Of course people might say, "Well, that's because those notes are in your range," which is a fair assessment, but the difference is, the other sections will be fluttering around and playing with different notes in the same phrase, but the altos will stagnate on the same three or four notes. Not much variety for us altos.

However, we do have the opportunity to sing low notes, which is wonderful. Sometimes we even get to sing the tenor part, which just fits perfectly into our range, especially if one is a second alto. This also means that we want to sing the tenor part, but most of the time we are not allowed to do that, which leads us to part envy.

If you are trying to find a musical theater piece in alto-land, just forget about it. The closest you will get is the "mezzo" books of pieces, and some do have some songs that fit your voice pretty well, but it takes a lot more time and effort to find a piece that is truly in your range, and one that you can knock it out of the park. This is not a problem for the sopranos or the tenors (pretty much any musical has these two voices as their leads.)

Of course there are some great parts of being an alto though. The fact that you can sing low enough to sing with the guys is not only convenient at times for your director, but it's also really fun. Especially when you shock people who low you can get. The same goes with the higher end of your range. Some altos have an astounding range so they can get relatively high and sing partly with the second sopranos.

And then when the alto section gets its time to shine, the world better look out, because these women will kick it into high gear and sing their hearts out. They will take the spotlight with their voices and make their part be heard. Mainly this is because we don't know when the next time we will have an awesome melody, so we make sure to use our time efficiently.

There are a lot of struggles with being an alto, but that can be said about any section. But, I wouldn't want to be in any other section than this, it's my home.