The Illinois Music Education Association’s (ILMEA) mission is to promote lifelong music learning and to provide leadership for music education.
Every year, Central’s band, orchestra and choir send the best students from each musical group to audition for ILMEA all-state bands, orchestras and choirs.
Central belongs to ILMEA’s District 9, the smallest, but most concentrated district in Illinois. According to Director of Bands DJ Alstadt, auditions are open to wind, percussion, string and vocal students. This year, auditions for both the concert and jazz portions of ILMEA were held at Addison Trail High School on Oct. 8.
“Each school is allowed to nominate 25 instrumentalists that are wind or percussionists,” Alstadt said. “We have four concert bands, which we call the curricular bands, and we open the nominations up to our curricular band students.”
Orchestra director Connie Reynolds nominated 10 of her students to audition.
There is a jazz component to ILMEA as well, according to Alstadt. There are two jazz choirs, a jazz band and a jazz combo – a rhythm section of about eight people consisting of drums, guitar, piano and bass along with trumpet, trombone and saxophone.
“We have three jazz combos at our school,” Alstadt said. “We send our top jazz combo to audition for the [ILMEA] jazz combo, and we send our entire top jazz band to audition for [ILMEA] jazz band slots.”
According to senior choir member Mary Downes, everyone who is in the advanced choir at Central, which is about 20 people, has to audition for both the concert and jazz components of ILMEA.
“[ILMEA] is a great opportunity to test your different musical skills,” Downes said. “For the audition, we had to have several different selections prepared. On top of that, we had to practice scales, sight reading, triads and scatting.”
According to Alstadt, most band students have been preparing for the ILMEA audition since last spring.
“The students already know the music so it’s just a matter of who wants to go through that rigorous audition process,” Alstadt said.
Downes and the other advanced choir members received the music over the summer and practiced up until the audition.
“The experience is really crazy,” Downes said. “You have about seven different audition rooms and each room has a different selection piece or a different skill requirement. You then wait in your appropriate line until you get called in. Even though the wait is pretty long, it’s a lot of fun getting to meet new people in line.”
Making it to just one of the district ensembles is extremely difficult, according to Alstadt.
“It’s one of those things that you have to work on for months in order to make it because the competition is so fierce,” Alstadt said. “It’s a really great experience for our students to hear other kids that are their age and what some of them are achieving.”
The students who made ILMEA’s band are seniors Marina Adamany (clarinet), Ivy Lei (flute), Stanley Liu (bassoon) and Cynsy Plant (euphonium), juniors Thomas Cushing (tenor saxophone), Isaac Frank (percussion) and William Gayde (percussion) and sophomore Matthew Lee (clarinet). In the orchestra are juniors Alyson Kanne (harp) and Youngeon Kim (clarinet) and sophomores Kathryn Lu (violin), Kayla Bull (oboe) and Stuart Elliot (tuba). The only Central musician to make ILMEA’s jazz band is senior Derek Duleba (guitar).
Vocalists in ILMEA’s chorus are seniors Derek Duleba and Nathan Hollander. Students who made vocal jazz are seniors Stephanie Echterling and Kendall Olsen and juniors Sawyer Jackson and Daphne McColl. Central’s vocalists in both the chorus and vocal jazz are seniors Sophia Araya, Julianna Doll, Mary Downes, Sabrina Gomez and Carly Randolph and junior Palak Shah.
Central will be hosting the jazz festival on Nov. 16, and the band, chorus and orchestra festival will be held on Nov. 23 at Aurora East High School.
