KASTA has organized a committee to review and revise the All-State Orchestra Audition Excerpts. The committee is chaired by Dr. Jacob Dakon and consists of 2-3 experts for each instrument. The timeline will be to finish the revision in time to get it approved at the KMEA Board Meetings this summer and implemented for the 2025-26 school year. Suggestions about specific excerpts should be sent to Dr. Dakon at jmdakon@ku.edu

Please consider nominating your awesome colleagues for a KASTA award. We have a new award this year for Outstanding Private Studio Teacher. The other awards are: Certificate of Merit, Distinguished Service, Young Teacher of the Year, and KASTA Hall of Fame. All nominees must be KASTA members except for the Distinguished Service Award. If you’d like to check on the membership of someone you have in mind to nominate, go to astastrings.org. Log in using your email address, and click on the “members” tab at the top. To nominate a member, click on the “Awards” tab in this site.

Please visit our newly re-formatted newsletter at: https://www.kasta.org/kasta-blog

The newsletter is now in a blog format instead of a PDF. It can be accessed at any time and will be updated often. Please send all newsletter materials to Olivia Bazanos, our new newsletter editor, at: obazanos@usd260.com. Olivia will format articles and announcements and get them up on the blog quickly.

We’re looking forward to a great in-person convention in Wichita next February. For the first time, we have two All-State Orchestras performing at the convention! This is a great achievement and a very exciting prospect. The clinician for the Full Orchestra will be Jessica Bejarano, conductor of the San Francisco Philharmonic. Literature will be Tchaikovsky’s Marche slave (Slavonic March), Op. 31 and 1812 Overture, Op. 49. The ensemble will rehearse in the Broadview Hotel just as in previous years. The String Orchestra clinician will be Thomas Taylor Dickey from Oklahoma State University. This group will rehearse in a church about six blocks from the Broadview. Literature will include Vivid by Shir Ran Yinon, Chorale by Stella Sung, and String Sinfonia in D Major by Felix Mendelssohn. Students for the new string orchestra will be chosen by audition in January using the same process and audition repertoire used for the full orchestra.

As with all manners of change, the addition of the new orchestra has created some logistical issues. Not only will our new string orchestra perform, but there will also be a third band for 1A and 2A schools performing as well. Faced with an impossibly long Saturday afternoon performance schedule, the KMEA Executive Board placed the both orchestra performances on Friday evening. This decision was based on the idea that it was easiest for directors who have students in both groups to have them performing back-to-back. The Friday night plan, however, presents a number of issues for us and our constituents:

1. Loss of rehearsal time;

2. The exhaustion factor, especially for wind players who will have been rehearsing all-day Friday and performing that same evening;

3. Loss of the sleep consolidation time that normally occurs between the Friday and Saturday rehearsals;

4. Difficulties for working parents to attend the concert on Friday evening; and

5. Most importantly, replacing the All-State Orchestra on the Saturday Concert with a newly added, non-audition performing group inadvertently creates the impression that KMEA views the Kansas All-State Full Orchestra, the premier orchestral ensemble and crowning achievement of both band and string students in Kansas, as secondary to the All-State Bands and Choirs, both auditioned and non-auditioned.

In my 40 plus years as a KMEA and KASTA member, I have learned that conflicting opinions are an important part any organization’s growth and development; however, the KASTA board strongly believes the new concert schedule should be re-opened for discussion and subseqently reevaluated. KASTA was not consulted before this decision was made by the KMEA Executive Board, and as an advisory body to the KMEA Board, we believe this would have been appropriate. We recommend that KASTA members concerned about this new schedule express their concerns to Executive Director, John Taylor (taylorj@friends.edu) and/or Mark Gard, KMEA President (president@ksmea.org).