Junior Jacqueline Lum jumped slightly as her mom excitedly pushed a phone at her during her birthday party. When her eyes adjusted and she read what was on the phone she freaked out as well, even calling her previous band director and her brother to tell them the good news: she made state.
“I was like ‘ what the heck am I looking at’ and I looked at [the phone]. It was the All-State list, and I saw ‘Jacqueline Lum’,” Lum said. “I just kinda went crazy.”
Juniors Anthony Peterson and Jacqueline Lum and Seniors Greg Tillotson and Ben Ayers all made it into the All-State band competition this year. Auditions for the All-State band will be held on February 10 in San Antonio, Texas. Once they get there, each player is assigned a letter and a group. These correlate to when each student will perform. Performances require students to play cuts selected from their three different musical compositions in front of all other students placed in their group, as well as five judges who are behind a curtain. This can be a very stressful time for players, such as Ayers, at the auditions.
“The hardest [part] would probably be going through the pressure of the auditions,” Ayers said. “It’s not necessarily that it’s hard but just having that pressure of ‘you might not make it’ or that something might screw up on that one day.”
Getting to this phase of auditions is not an easy feat. Each of the participants practiced for hours to perfect each piece and went through Region and Area auditions before becoming eligible for State, with each competition getting progressively harder, as they included better musicians each time.
“It isn’t about the difficulty of the music,” Peterson said. “Really, it’s a competition of how much detail you can put into one piece, so it takes hours of work on each piece.”
All competition is fierce, especially at this level. Each participant has gone through Region and Area competitions beforehand, so by this stage of competitions the only people auditioning are some of the best players in the state, some of whom are the same players students like Ayers have been in competition with since the very beginning of the competitions.
In this area of the state it’s extremely hard,” Ayers said. “75% of the horns that go there are from the DFW area so in this area it’s super super competitive.”
Despite all the pressure and stress, these students have worked very diligently to make it to state auditions. They are all very happy with their progress as musicians, and believe that every ounce of effort they put into perfecting their music has been worth it.
“The payoff that you get from the concert that we have on the Saturday of the All-State clinic is just so amazing,” Tillotson said. “It’s indescribable.”
