After the conclusion of auditions for the annual All-State Music Festival on Oct. 21, the Kennedy Music Department will send 20 accepted musicians as well as 2 alternates to perform on Nov. 18.
The students selected for the band consist of seniors Jersey Bilyeu and Luke Wiedel, juniors Andrew Campell, Kieran Glessner, Anne Goodin and Delaney Steenblock, sophomore Camden Neff and junior Amelia Gilbert as an alternate. The students selected in the orchestra are senior Griffin Bieber, junior Lucas Horton and junior alternate Remi Wilcox. The vocalists selected for the choir are seniors Daraiya Hurt, Trisiyah Hurt, Owen Kilgore, Sam Larson, Yuna Song and Aidan Ziegler, juniors Jenae Cooper, Srinidhi Kompella, Alex Miller and Avery Theis and sophomore Sam Bloomquist.
The number of accepted musicians is the highest Kennedy has seen recently, almost doubling since last year. In 2022, 12 of Kennedy’s musicians were selected for the festival as well as one alternate, with only four choir, eight band and one orchestra student selected.
“This was a dramatic uptake this year compared to recent years,” choir director Storm Ziegler said.
Numbers have been low since the disruption caused by COVID-19. The Iowa All-State Music Festival was canceled in 2020 due to health and safety concerns surrounding the pandemic. After the derecho damage to Kennedy in 2021 following the shutdown of schools from the pandemic, Kennedy’s music department lacked students.
“Coming out of COVID it was hard to get kids to do the things that were normal to do before COVID. I feel like we are back now without interrupted cycles of school,” Ziegler said. “I feel as if now All-State is on people’s radars again.”
Many musicians lost access to resources through school essential for their learning. Students lost the ability to attend music classes in person and the easy access to their teachers as mentors.
“I stopped singing altogether and thought I was done with choir,” first-time All-State Tenor Avery Theis said. “I didn’t have any resources to keep learning when everything shut down”
Since the reopening of schools, the Kennedy Choir Department has worked to rebuild a normal environment for students to encourage learning and practice.
“There were a lot of kids who were impacted by COVID in different ways,” Ziegler said. “Learning how to do school, developing resilience, being able to establish a long-term goal and then work towards it incrementally over time were all things kind of lost that we have been rebuilding over the past couple of years.”
Maintaining normality throughout the music department during the reopening of schools allowed students to jump back into choir, band and orchestra and attempt to pick up where they so abruptly left off.
“Down in the choir room I continued to hold students accountable after the pandemic and because of that I think our recovery has been faster,” Ziegler said.
The implementation of new resources this year provided students with more opportunities to prepare for the audition process.
“I required all members of Chamber Choir to attend an All-State prep camp where they learned all the music over the summer,” Ziegler said. “That way when we got to class, we could pretty much skip that step and start working on musical issues and building ensembles right away. That was probably the biggest factor in the improvement.”
These resources not available during the pandemic let students improve and practice well before before auditions took place.
“I’ve been properly able to prepare for the All-State audition process through the availability of choir classes at Kennedy and the guidance of Mr. Ziegler and Mrs. Brunson,” Theis said.
Kennedy musicians departed from Kennedy on Thursday, Nov. 16 for the three-day-long festival.
“I am very excited to be around extremely talented singers and I’m really excited to perform on Saturday,” Theis said.
