Dr. Kevin Vigil is the 2014 Shenandoah Teacher of the Year for Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS). He’s the Guitar & Music Theory Director at Heritage High School, Chair of the Virginia Music Educators Association Guitar Council & All-Virginia Guitar Ensemble, and Member-At-Large of the NAfME Council for Guitar Education.
Each year, among other things, LCPS puts on a terrific All-County Festival and Assessment event for its students. Here at our GCcom headquarters in Austin, Texas, we’re just a week away from our own district Concert & Sight Reading event. Despite the challenges of organizing an event like this, we’ve found the experience to be incredibly beneficial for students and teachers alike, and totally worth the effort. We reached out to Dr. Kevin Vigil for his perspective.
Growth, Change, and Lessons Learned Since 2005
"In 2005, I was honored to be invited as a performer/clinician for the LCPS All-County High School Guitar Festival, which led to my current position there as a guitar teacher. My experience as a guest artist led me to think of other ways to shape this festival. With the support of our administration and the dedication of our incredible guitar faculty, the LCPS Guitar Festival & Assessment has become a great event for our students.
Benjamin Verdery was the first artist I invited. At that time, our one-day event consisted of student performances, coachings and a concert by the guest artist, a short break, then more student performances and coaching. Benjamin and I both agreed it's quite difficult to perform with only a 30-minute lunch break after coaching several ensembles, which led to changes for the following year.
Andrew York was the next artist we brought; he was more of an Artist-in-Residence. He stayed for a few days, working with students in various schools, and gave a concert on the final day. That was certainly a step in the right direction.
The Tantalus Quartet came in 2008, which offered a new opportunity to restructure our event. Tantalus performed an opening concert and worked with the students the next day. Since we had four artists, each one of them could act as a clinician. The idea of having quartets then became a model for several of our events. We've had the Canadian Guitar Quartet three times, the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, Texas Guitar Quartet, and the Oregon Guitar Quartet. The magic number seems to be four: when we don’t have quartets, we still usually have four performing guest artist/clinicians.
Loudoun County has grown exponentially since 2005. We've grown from seven high schools to 15, with a 16th opening 2019 – 2020. All of our high schools have guitar programs. With this growth, we've started splitting the festival day into morning and afternoon sessions, with half of the schools participating in each.
This growth created scheduling challenges that became great opportunities for the students. With four clinicians working with four different ensembles in four different rooms, what could the other students do? We added four more clinicians, each presenting 30-minute workshops on various topics, with students rotating from one workshop to the next. Our sessions usually include a guitar maker, with other workshops including members of military bands, guitar history, careers in music, guitar and health, music business, technique, song writing, music therapy, improvisation and guitar technology.
This Year
If you were a student participating in this year’s festival/assessment, this is what you would have experienced: The opening concert featured soloists Júlio Ribiero Alves, Stephen Lochbaum and Ryan Book, then Patrick Roux conducted the world-premiere of his new work Heart, Soul and Passion (commissioned and dedicated to the students of Loudoun County) with a student guitar orchestra comprising the top four students from each school. The next day, you'd check-in, have a short time to tune and warm up, have a coaching with one of our guest artists, do a group sight reading assessment, have a brief break for concessions or to visit the vendor (Music and Arts), then go through four workshops: Music Therapy (Patricia Winters), Entrepreneurism (Fiaza Alam), Musicology (Leilani Dade) and Guitar Making (Zebulon Turrentine). You'd have pizza, then go to the auditorium, where half of the county’s school ensembles would play in the non-competitive assessment concert. Our four guest artists assessed the student performances and assigned a rating with written comments.
The LCPS Guitar Festival/Assessment is not only for our guitar students; the entire community is invited. The opening concert is free and open to the public, and I'm always amazed by who travels to attend it.
This year’s event took place in two locations. The opening concert was hosted by this year’s event chair, Kareem McCullough, at Loudoun County High School. The festival/assessment day was hosted at Heritage High School (my school). Parent and student organizations supplied the necessary volunteers. The Parent Teacher Association at LCHS paid Patrick Roux’s airfare, and the Heritage Music Boosters organized the food for students and staff, ran the concessions, and organized the student volunteers. Student volunteers received volunteer hours from the Tri-M Music Honors Society, Student Council Association, National Honors Society, National English Honors Society and the Interact Club (International Rotary).
Benefits
What are the benefits of having a County-Wide Guitar Festival? Everything! Students enjoy an incredibly enriching experience, meet new friends, and leave this event excited about new possibilities. The community has the opportunity to enjoy live music performed by professionals and students. Parents are directly engaged, and volunteerism comes to the forefront. The guitar teachers beam with pride with a sense of fulfillment for a job well done and a new vision for the future of their programs. This is a win-win for all involved!
If you do not have an All-County or All-District event in your area and you would like to have one, start small and build from there. As you gain community and administrative support, you will be able to offer incredible opportunities for your students."