State 08!!!

Wow - what an exciting and fun day. State 08 with the Advanced Orchestra and Symphony on Friday May 9, 2008 in Corvallis at the OSU LaSelle Stewart center was a great success. Both groups performed and sight read very well! Here are the standings:

Advanced Orchestra - placed 7th out of 20 groups (15 performed that day). That's up 4 places from '07. We were only 12 points away from 5th place and only 7 points away from 6th place. Our sightreading score was the same as one of the groups that placed in the top 5. Another interesting fact - of all the top groups, the very highest score from any single judge was 92 (out of 100) and our top score was an 87. I received many comments from other directors that they were very impressed with our performance!

The results:
1st Reynolds
2nd Crescent Valley
3rd South Salem
4th Sprague
5th South Eugene
6th ? (I'll let you know when I find out)
7th West Salem!!! (We're in very good company!)

Advanced Symphony - placed 5 out of 7 (5 groups performed that day). We were only 8 points away from 4th - and 6 of those points were due to a lower sightreading score. I've heard that at these competitions, going first in a category isn't always the best advantage, and I think in our case that was true. Actually, the scores for performance for the 4th place group were very close to ours (they played after us).

The results:
1st Reynolds
2nd South Salem
3rd Sprague
4th West Linn
5th West Salem!! (By the way, I don't know about West Linn's program, but I can tell you that Reynolds, South Salem, and Sprague have very strong, big programs with 100 - 200 string players of which the top 50 play in the symphony - we have 73 string students in our entire program!)

Thanks to CCTV, a DVD and CD will be available for these concerts - more info about that in another posting. I think that all students and parents should be proud of this day for West. We played musically, sensitively, maturely, and cohesively - the DVD will be a wonderful, permanent reminder of hard work and wonderful goal accomplishment.

I'll post pictures and any other comments I receive. If any parents or students have fun pictures from the day's events, please feel free to email them to me - and if you have hard copies, please bring them to me for our memento book.

And, big thanks and congratulations to all the seniors and students not returning to our advanced groups next year! You helped us have a very successful State performance in '08! Stay tuned for an announcement about the Wind Ensemble after their performance today (Saturday May 10)...

~Ms. S (silberman_daryl@salkeiz.k12.or.us)