<p>I have to agree with others, my experience with all state programs (both instrumental and choral) is that you have to take them with a grain of salt. The fact that someone makes all state can be as irrelevant in judging someone’s future as not making it can be. To be brutally honest, the people assessing all state may not be that great at assessing in terms of what makes for a musician or vocalist who has the ability to make it, plus the procedure to make it there might very well leave off a really talented kid because of the methodology (for example, the second best vocalist in an area who doesn’t make it might be better then the winner in another area).</p>
<p>I am not knocking the idea of All State or saying it is worthless, what I am saying is what others have, as a benchmark about whether you can make it in as a musician is dicey. On top of everything else, I know of examples from my own time in music programs (note, I was not all state caliber, I was more like all star hall of shame as a music student) plus from what I have seen, there can be bias against certain high level students, where music teachers can resent a kid who is out there ‘taking space’ in all state (some of the people involved in all state basically treat it as the domain of public school music programs and can resent ‘outsiders’ or whatever…not all, not a lot, just saying it can happen). Basically, all state exists in its own world and may or may not reflect on how good the students who get accepted (or rejected) are. I can tell you that in instrumental music, the kids who are in the top level high school music programs, the prep and pre college programs, rarely do all state. </p>
<p>To give you an idea, my son had an evaluation done as part of a music teacher’s association program, where the student goes, plays in front of other teachers and get an assessment,in terms of who does the judging it is similar to all state as I know it. At the time of the last one my son did he had auditioned for and gotten into a really high level program on violin, and he was playing one of the bach solo partitas as part of his rep( a particularly difficult fugue). He played the same piece at his assessment, and the person there ripped apart his playing, telling him he wasn’t playing bach right (his main private teacher saw the assessment, rolled their eyes at the comments, and said the person seemed to think Bach was writing in 1870, not 1720). </p>
<p>Vocal music is different then instrumental, with instrumental music, especially strings, the development is way earlier, and thus by the time you get to senior year of high school, if you are a string player and behind the curve, it has implications about the future, whereas vocalists develop much, much later as others have said.</p>
<p>My recommendation? If you are seriously thinking of at some point getting into vocal music, find a high level teacher you can get to, and get an assessment of your skills and weaknesses, to see what they think, someone who teaches at a respected music program is not a bad way to go. The other piece of advice I can give is if you really love to sing and have any hope of going forward with it, if you can find yourself a private teacher to start working on it…and even if you don’t major in voice in college, you can still get as much out of your voice you can:)</p>
In hs, he played trumpet, wrote music, and was involved in music tech, which he did go on to study at a music school. One summer, he took private singing lessons with an opera prof in our community. The improvement was unbelievable. Then he found a private teacher at his university and took a studio, which he was allowed to do because he was already a music major. Today, his singing is by comparison, quite beautiful, and he’s comfortable singing on stage and recording his own indie material on