Upper School French students participated in Manie Musicale for the third year in a row.

Manie Musicale is a French song competition started in 2017 by Stephanie Carbonneau and Michelle Fournier, two middle school French teachers from Maine. They modeled “Musical Madness” after the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament with the goal of increasing student engagement in the French language, expanding their cultural knowledge, and improving their French skills using popular songs. The organizers strive to include a great variety of songs, both in terms of genre and the background of the artists. You can peruse this year’s bracket and the results in the photo.

Kudos to Sophia Brands '22, Andrew Burke '22, Lily Farr '22, and Nora Ronan '22 for setting up and maintaining the bracket bulletin board. Please note that you can listen to the playlist on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple Music. Be forewarned, though, that there are several earworms! 

Felicitations to Nathan Brown '24, Andrew Burke '22, Alina Gangji '23 , Ashley Gable '24, Ilyas Kose '22, Katie Lu '24, Katy Shnier '22 and Ginny Toso '24 who earned the most points in their respective classes. Only five students (Andrew Burke, Grayson Bucher, Ilyas Kose, Katy Shnier, and Ginny Toso) correctly predicted that  “Nouveau Monde'' would win it all. For those of you keeping track, that’s the second year in a row that Ilyas predicted the winner!

This year, Madame Sanborn and some of her students contributed to the Manie Musicale effort. In addition to sharing resources with other Manie Musicale teachers, Madame Sanborn helped to screen possible songs, participated in the artist outreach committee, and was one of the commentators for the Maniaques de Musique show. More excitingly, some of her students also got to contribute to one of the episodes. You can watch that episode here. Since Manie Musicale 2022 had over 3,000 schools participating from all 50 states and fourteen countries, that means that we have some celebrities in our midst!