A Study Of The Music Competition Festival In The State Of Kansas PDF Download

This thesis will deal with the historical and educational aspects of the Kansas Music Competition-Festival and will discuss present inadequacies and suggested reforms. The Music Competition-Festival in Kansas has undergone many changes since its inception at Emporia in 1938. These changes have been brought about mostly for expediency in the operation of the festival and for the purpose of conforming with the regulations of the Activities Association. Many of the possibilities of the Competition-Festival as an educational event have been overlooked in order for it to function as a democratic process and still keep a comparatively proper place in our school schedules in regard to time and expenses. Other states that contributed information for this thesis are faced with similar problems although some of them do have regulations better than those in the Kansas Festival. Many of them include sight-reading for some festival entries. The addition of this would help to give the Kansas Festival added educational stature. Throughout the United States the Competition-Festival remains principally a contest even though there is no single winner in any one event. The festival processes are conducted, if at all, at local and county level. The survey portion of this thesis was sent to a total of 291 administrators, adjudicators and music directors in the Kansas Festival area. While there were individual differences of opinion on some questions, there was no sharp differentiation among these groups to portend any basic differences of opinion regarding their working approach to the festival. The majority of them admitted the Kansas Festival does not measure well by educational standards. Only one of the reporting states has a separate music division in its State School Activity Association. This adoption by other states would immeasurably aid the Competition-Festival as well as other facets of the public school music program. A development of the program initiated by the National Interscholastic Music Activities Commission to study the music festival regulations of all the states and draw up a national program of recommended regulations would be of great benefit to each state. The music directors of Kansas do not advocate any extreme changes in the festival. It is noteworthy, however, to mention that even though the Kansas State High School Activities Association is adding additional district centers, we find a dual situation of continuous overcrowding on the one hand, and on the other a gradual withdrawal from festival entry, particularly from larger schools. These schools feel that the festival does not offer the advantages to the individual student and to the department that a limited concert tour, for examplex, can provide. The writer of this thesis believes that the Competition-Festival must contain all possible educational qualities if it is to hold successfully its position in a science-stressed curriculum and that this can be achieved in part by holding some of the district events at a local league or county level and thus be able to include a clinical program.