The Adair – Casey / Guthrie Center High School Concert Band was able to make a strong impression at the Iowa State Large Group Music Contest on May 4th.

Band Director Kyra Babcock says that last year was the first time since 2004 that the concert band had received a Division I Rating at the competition, and that for this year they wanted to do it once again. She tells Raccoon Valley Radio that the band were their own toughest critics after the performance.

“We all walked out Saturday thinking we did not get that Division I, because we all felt like individually and as a concert band, we made just too many little mistakes. And to our surprise, two of the three judges gave us a Division I. The third gave us a Division II, just by one point, we missed it, getting a straight Division I. And when you add the two Division I’s with a Division II, they average it out and it ends up being a Division I. So we were pleasantly surprised because we were hard on ourselves about the mistakes we made.”

Babcock mentions that to try and go for the Division I Rating again, they chose to perform two hard pieces of music, “Choose Joy” by Randell Standridge and “Amen” by Frank Ticheli, with the toughest being “Choose Joy,” because of the technical aspects of the piece.