Several musicians from Adel-DeSoto-Minburn overcame challenges brought on by COVID-19 to earn All-State Music honors. 

Five ADM students earned All-State honors. Juniors Carly Kuhse and Sarah DenHerder were accepted to All-State Band. Kuhse for clarinet and DenHerder for french horn. Three ADM seniors were named to the All-State Choir. Brennan McGee and Cascio Riker for bass, and Sean Whitson for Tenor. 

Since submissions were pre-recorded, Kuhse tells Raccoon Valley Radio this added extra pressure to be close to perfect, “It’s not as nervewracking, it’s just a lot more tedious. There’s a lot more mistakes that you can’t make because you know everybody else has the same time to record and rerecord as many times as they want to. So it’s a lot different.”

The annual All-State Music Festival in Ames is cancelled this year. Whitson says while it’s been a challenging adjustment, it’s brought everyone closer together, “On the choir side, I definitely feel like I’ve gotten closer to Casio and Brennan. Before signing in the actual choir at our school, we would all just sing alone and it felt really good to be singing with other people. It was just a really cool experience to go through this process together instead of alone.”

Due to COVID-19 concerns, auditions were submitted virtually instead of played live in person. You can hear more from Kuhse, DenHerder, McGee, Riker, Whitson on today’s Perry Fareway Let’s Talk Dallas County program on KDLS, and RaccoonValleyRadio.com.