Congratulations on a perfect score
at this past Saturday’s MSBOA Orchestra Festival

Congratulations on your excellent scores to those Lahser students who participated at the MSBOA Orchestra Festival on Saturday, March 8, 2008. As a director, probably the most challenging thing about such a competition is selecting the music. It is of course important to play appropriate music (i.e. professional, sophisticated literature), but also to make sure that the difficulty is at the right level. As a performer, it's always nice to play things that sound harder than they actually are. Having said that, it's also good to be challenged and forced to rise to the occasion.

Schools are categorized according to their student body size, and Lahser is a class B sized high school. For Festival, directors must choose from a list of "required" selections. Now, the kicker: music from the class B "list" is not of the caliber that we as musicians strive to perform. Both the Mozart symphony and the Holst suite that we performed were pulled from the class AA list. The moral of this story is that Lahser's orchestra played very difficult music at a very high level. They should be very proud of themselves! Congratulations on a fantastic job.

Matt McMillan,
Director, Lahser Orchestra