The Enid News and Eagle, Enid, OK

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April 29, 2009

Musician plays piano, trumpet at Tri-State Music Festival

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By Kasey Fowler, Staff Writer

Elementary school music students streamed into Enid Wednesday for the first day of the 77th annual Tri-State Music Festival.

Payton Koehn, a fifth-grader from Meno, was one of the students playing a piano piece for the judges at Central Christian Church.

“I’ve been playing about three years,” she said. “When I was in lessons my teacher, she asked me if I wanted to be in (Tri-State).”

Koehn also played trumpet earlier in the day with the Ringwood Elementary School band.

When she was finished playing her piece, her little sister, Madison, entered the room to play.

“I’ve been playing since this year. This is my first time in Tri-State,” Madison said.

Taylor Wagner, also of Meno, followed the Koehn sisters in her first performance at Tri-State. Her favorite part of playing piano is all the different sounds she can make.

“My favorite part is that I can press lots of keys and it makes lots of different sounds,” Wagner said.

The judge for the piano room, Marilyn Knaak, is a retired music teacher.

“I’ve been a judge for just five years,” she said. “The first time I was a judge another lady was scheduled, but she broke her leg the day she was suppose to judge. The next year she was in a car accident. She decided not to do it any more after that.”

Knaak was born and raised in Enid but moved away for a while and taught music in Ponca City. She came back to Enid and has played for several churches here.

Knaak said she does judging to help students.

“I enjoy helping students and encouraging them,” she said. “Sometimes they don’t realize where they are lacking and other areas where they are doing really well and sound really good. Sometimes they practice a piece so much it becomes mechanical and they don’t realize what they are omitting.”

Knaak said students often need to add emotion to their pieces.

“I want to encourage them to add dynamics and emotions. It is like a story,” she said. “If someone said the same things, in the same way at the same level it would be boring. It needs to be like a novel with emotions.”

Knaak said some of the pieces weren’t written with dynamic levels because the composers didn’t have the option.

“When the composers wrote they didn’t have peddles. They would have used them if they did. We have that option to use them,” Knaak said.

By adding dynamics and emotions to a piano piece musicians can pull the audience in.

“A lot of kids start their piano careers in church, and the idea there is to get the congregation to sing. If you put a lot of expression in they will be excited to sing,” Knaak said.

Tri-State Music Festival will continue today with middle school and high school musical competitions.

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