LHS is known for its excellence of many different aspects: sports, theater, but especially band. The band at LHS has been known for its prestige for many years. Emphasizing that prestige, this year’s attendance to the competitive All-State Band concert held record numbers of LHS musicians.

All-State Band is a concert held every year that high school musicians around the state audition for. LHS has been known for sending more than the average amount of musicians.

“In my 19 years at LHS, the fewest we’ve ever sent is 21 students and the most that we’ve sent is 40, which was this year,” said band director Daniel Carlson. “The record for most amount of musicians sent to All-State Band was 37, set back in 2010. This year, the next closest school to the amount of musicians as us had 20 kids participate. In total, there were 180 students that participated this year, so LHS holds a percentage of that number.”

Students who participate in All-State Band take part in a complicated audition process to do so. Qualified candidates must have a range of abilities in order to be chosen for All-State Band.

“It is a pretty rigorous audition process to participate in All-State Band,” said Carlson. “They have to learn nine minor scales, nine major scales, a full range on the instrument and have to play a specific tempo and speed. They also have to have the chromatic scale, take a 50 question term test and memorize and prepare a solo which is about six to eight minutes in length. It’s a live audition where judges pick a certain part of the music to play. The audition process also includes a sight-reading aspect. They put the music in front of the students and they have around 30 seconds to play it, which is really hard.”

This amount of work needed takes time, requiring students to spend many hours preparing for auditions.

“Usually the preparation starts sometime in the summer for students, sometimes even before that,” said Carlson. “Students probably put in around 20 hours of work together before the concert, plus all of the individual practice time put in.”

All of this hard work, plus the sizable amount of talented musicians that LHS holds, gives perfect reason why LHS continues to send record numbers to the competitive All-State Band concert.