Lisa Caravan - President, Alabama Orchestra Association
I hope you all are enjoying summer, getting a well-deserved break and are now gearing up for the new school year! As I enter my first term as president, I am thrilled by the increasing string activity across our state. Summer camps such as the Montgomery Music Project Summer Camp, Auburn University String and Chamber Music Camp, Stringfellows Summer Music Seminar and Summer String Camp (Community Music School) at University of Alabama (and any others I may have missed) provide experiences to our young string students to develop their musicianship and build our string community. Please look for these opportunities for your students for summer 2014!
We are pleased to announce this year’s upcoming All State Festival Event. Please spread the word to students and teachers after you read so that we don’t miss anyone. We have a lot more orchestra teachers and students in the state now and we want to make sure they know about All State. As always, you may also point them towards the website
www.alabamaorchestraassociation.org.
We are pleased to announce the repertoire and conductor for the Festival Orchestra. James Ross is the Director of Orchestral Activity at the University of Maryland, Artistic Director of the National Orchestral Institute (NOI) and newly-named Associate Director of the Conducting Program at the Juilliard School. As always the programming for the Festival Orchestra will be outstanding. Mr. Ross will be leading the Festival Orchestra in a performance of Overture to Candide by Leonard Bernstein, IV. Allegro energico e passionate from Symphony No 1 by Johannes Brahms and the world premiere of the winning piece from our composition contest.
We are excited to continue the expanded Sinfonia Orchestra (includes Winds, Brass and Percussion), which was a resounding success this past year. A special thanks to wind, brass, and percussion teachers for encouraging their students to audition and participate in the inaugural year! We are please to announce that Dr. John Fetter will be conducting the group this year. He is the assistant professor of music education at the
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Eastman School of Music and is the director of the Philharmonia and Sinfonia Youth Orchestras for the Hochstein School of Music and Dance. As a conductor, he has worked with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Richmond Symphony Orchestra, and the New Hampshire Music Festival Orchestra. The program for Sinfonia will be Overture to Rienzi by Wagner (arr. by Dackow), Kabalevsky Suite by Kabalevsky (arr. Hull), Hungarian Dance No. 5 Brahms (ed. by Schmeling) and Movement IV.
Allegro
Moderato from Symphony No. 2 by Sibelius (arr. by Leidig).
We are also very excited about our conductor for the Consort Orchestra, Dr. James Mick, who comes to us from Ithaca College where he is director of String Music Education and Orchestral Activities. Dr. Mick conducts the Ithaca College Sinfonietta and the music director of the Ithaca Community Orchestra and is wonderful with young orchestras! You can read more about him and our other conductors at the AOA website.
To our winds, brass and percussion teachers, please check our website for specific instrumentation, audition excerpts and audition procedures. We absolutely cannot make this a success without your students and we appreciate your support in this endeavor. If you have any questions at all about All State Orchestra or any of the audition or registration procedures, please do not hesitate to contact me,
caravanlr@auburn.edu.
Please be mindful of the deadline for scholarship assistance for students to attend the festival. If you are in need of financial aid please make use of these funds. The deadline is very strict, October 15th, for all financial aid applications.
Back again this year will be online registration for auditions and festival registration at our web site
www.alabamaorchestraassociation.org. Here you will find all the latest information for registrations and anything pertaining to AOA. Thank you to everyone, especially our brilliant Webmaster Kenyon Wilson. If you have suggestions as to how we can improve the registration process or have comments about your experience with it last year please email those to me.
For interested exhibitors there are five potential exhibit locations in the Moody Music Building during the Festival. Exhibitors may set up any time after 4:00 on Thursday, February 13 and remain until the
concert is over on Sunday afternoon, February 16. This time window is the available time, but exhibitors are not required to be present at all times and may choose to use any periods within this time frame. There will be no reduction in fee for reduced usage. The AOA President, Lisa Caravan, must receive all requests for exhibitor space via email at
caravanlr@auburn.edu before January 31, 2014. Three prime locations are available in the lobby. There is a fee for each spot and use of space includes up to two 6’ tables for two spots and three 6’ tables for one spot. A $100 deposit is required to reserve a lobby spot. Two other locations in the building, closer to rehearsal rooms but with less space, will be made available for a reduced price. Use of these spaces includes one 6’ table each. For more information, please visit our website and click on the 2014 festival link.
To all of our string teachers out there, please plan on attending the annual AMEA conference in January at the Renaissance Conference Center in Montgomery, January 23-25, 2014. We will have Roland Huthmaker present a session on instrument repair, a session by our own Dr. Anne C. Witt on classroom management systems and routines, two sessions by Gabriel Villasurda, a frequent presenter across the country, who comes to us from Michigan and more! I know we are all busy during the year with many responsibilities, but let’s come together to learn new teaching strategies and to share ideas with one another to build our string teachers’ community. We have a growing presence in our state and therefore a responsibility to continue the health of that growth. Let your voice be heard and your presence known. Our general business meeting during this time will be on Friday January 24th 3:30-4:20 in the conference center. Please make plans to attend. Back by popular demand is the reading session sponsored by J.W. Pepper and will last for a double session this year. We will read through several titles for string orchestra so please bring your instrument to the conference. After our business meeting we will raffle off the titles. Entry in the raffle is free but you must attend the meeting to submit an entry.
Thank-you as always for all that you do to educate our young string players. It is a pleasure serving as your president and I look forward to an excellent year.
Sincerely, Lisa Caravan
August/September 2013
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