Important Updates for 24-2025

1. Next year’s audition will include aural recall.  We will roll out examples and a rubric within the next few weeks to help you prepare your students for next year’s audition.  Sight reading and rhythm reading will be reduced to four measures instead of five.  We may need to adjust a few other things on the audition to keep it within the time constraints, but the only added item will be aural recall.  All will be announced soon.

2. Students need to show ID at the time of auditioning.  School or government ID is fine.   A director may not simply vouch for the student.  The student must have an ID in order to audition.  This is due to dishonesty that has occured during auditions in the past.

3.  We will ask for your help next fall in collecting email addresses for the students and parents once a student has been accepted into All-State.  We aren’t sure how that will look yet.  But this will hopefully alleviate your overall workload in communication to the students and their families.  We will be able to communicate information such as ticket sales, All-State merch, second audition info, and anything else that may come up.

4. Next year festival dates:  this is the trickiest part and has been keeping me up at night.  We are completely at the mercy of scheduling and must factor in many different items such as CMEA, the Buell, Embassy, holidays, etc.  It will never be a perfect fit for everyone.  Please know we don’t take this lightly and understand it may not be ideal, but we are doing the best we can.  We even considered returning to Sunday-Tuesday as an option with how much of a struggle this has been.  But we all decided Thursday-Saturday is better for many reasons.

Next year scheduling conflicts to consider:

CMEA Jan 29-Feb 1

All-State Orchestra Feb 6-8

Valentines Day/Presidents Day Feb 13-15

March – many musicals statewide

We decided to have the festival at the same time as the All-State Orchestra after talking with their board chair.  But, neither Buell nor the Embassy were available.  We then tried for Jan 16-18 (MLK weekend), but the Embassy wasn’t available.  Therefore, this gave us one option.

I very much know this is not ideal and significantly earlier than we are used to.  The board will tighten up the turnaround time of announcing students who made it.  I will ensure all music and practice tracks are available at the time of announcement (which will happen before Thanksgiving).

5.  Lastly, we know not everyone was able to get rooms at the Embassy for their students this year and we apologize for the hassle.  Attempting to make it easier for you next year, please fill out this form if you weren’t able to get rooms at the Embassy.  

Thank you so much.  Please don’t hesitate to send questions my way.