Elementary Festival Honor Choir
The Elementary Festival Honor Choir is an independent honor choir of approximately 180 fourth, fifth and sixth grade students who are selected by recorded audition. The choir meets and performs each year during the annual SDSU Choral Day event.
Concert Information:
Doors open at 4:30 p.m.
Concert begins at 4:45 p.m.
Not a ticketed event. Event will not be livestreamed.
Audition Requirements
- Students must be in the fourth, fifth or sixth grade at the time of audition.
- Students must be recommended by their school music teacher, director or private instructor.*
- Teachers and students must work together to submit an audition form and upload an audio file.
- A $5 registration fee is required from each student who auditions.
- Students chosen to be part of the Elementary Honor Choir must be accompanied by their music teacher on the day of the festival.
- Audio files must be uploaded to the link provided at registration.
Students selected for the Elementary Honor Choir will practice in Brookings during the day and end with a concert in the Oscar Larson Performing Arts Center. An additional charge of $40 per student is assessed once a student receives notification of acceptance. The charge covers the cost of a T-shirt (worn during the performance), lunch, snack breaks and music. An additional set of music will be provided to each teacher who has students selected.
*Parents are not allowed to submit. Schools of any size (public, private, studio or homeschool) are able to submit auditions.
Andrea Ramsey enjoys an international presence as a composer, conductor, scholar and music educator. Her teaching experiences range from work with adolescent and children’s voices to high school and collegiate voices. She enjoys regular opportunities to conduct all-state and divisional level honor choirs, festival events at Carnegie Hall, and served as a principal conductor for the Pacific International Young Women’s Choral Festival in Eugene, Oregon and conducted the National ACDA Junior High/Middle School Honor Choir in 2023.
An award-winning composer with nearly 200 works to date, Ramsey previously held positions in music education and conducting at Ohio State University and the University of Colorado, respectively. She believes strongly in the creation of new works, and her compositions are available with traditional publishers and through MusicSpoke, a digital sheet music marketplace. She regularly enjoys residencies and collaborations with ensembles and festival choirs across North America and abroad.
As a scholar, she has presented for state, divisional and national conventions of the American Choral Directors Association, the Sixth Annual Symposium on Sociology in Music Education, as well as the Phenomenon Singing Symposium in St. Johns in Canada. Additionally, she has co-authored articles published in the Choral Journal, as well as the Journal of Research in Music Education.
