Notes from KMF 2026 — what we heard adjudicating the strings category

The Kenya Music Festival is the country's largest annual showcase of school and community music — over 50,000 entries across the year, regional rounds feeding into a national finale. This year two of our trainers, both string specialists, were invited to adjudicate the regional strings category over three days. They came back with notes, opinions, and one persistent observation about where Kenyan string playing is going.

The level has moved

The first thing both noticed — independently, before they'd compared notes — is that the floor has risen. A "solid" strings entry at the regional level in 2026 would have been a strong national finalist in 2018. The standard piece selection has shifted noticeably toward more technically demanding repertoire: Vivaldi, Bach, a surprising number of Mozart selections at the upper school level. Five years ago, these were rare. Now they're common, and being played reasonably well by students who would have been on Grade 4 syllabus pieces a few years back.

What hasn't moved as much is the top end. The best players at regionals this year were comparable to the best of any year — there's a ceiling to what school-age string playing can achieve without conservatoire-level resources, and we don't seem to have raised it. But the middle has compressed upward, and that matters. More students are arriving at competitions with genuine command of their instrument rather than getting through pieces on rehearsal alone.

Three things our adjudicators kept writing on score sheets

From the comment summaries both trainers brought back, three patterns came up across nearly every entry:

• "Beautiful tone, rushed phrasing." Tone production has improved dramatically — the days of scratchy bowing at school competitions seem to be over. But many students are still pushing through pieces at tempos they haven't earned, losing the musical line. The remedy is, frankly, slower practice — something we say to our own students more often than they want to hear.
• "Strong individually, weaker as ensemble." Ensemble strings entries are still where the level is most variable. Individual players can be excellent, but the listening across the section — the giving and taking of musical space — is rare. This is teachable, and we suspect schools that invest in regular sectional rehearsals are going to see large gains.
• "Choose pieces that fit you." The single most common diagnostic note both trainers wrote. Ambitious repertoire chosen above a student's actual level produced more disappointing performances than any other factor. A piece played beautifully always wins over a piece played heroically but imperfectly.

What we're taking back to the studio

Adjudicating is one of the most useful things a teacher can do — it forces you to listen the way an examiner listens, to weigh dozens of versions of the same piece against each other in a single afternoon, and to articulate what makes one performance more compelling than the next. Our trainers came back with three things they're actively bringing into lessons:

First, more emphasis on slow practice as a standing weekly exercise, not just an exam-preparation tool. Both trainers commented that the students they heard who clearly practised slowly were obvious within the first 30 seconds. The opposite was equally obvious.

Second, more recital practice. Concerto students in the upper grades will be performing for each other in small in-house recitals more often this term. The gap between playing a piece well in a lesson and playing it well under pressure is a skill that has to be built, not assumed.

Third, a renewed seriousness about ensemble work. We've added an optional weekly string ensemble session at the studio — open to our students grade 4 and above — for exactly this reason. Sectional listening can't be taught in a one-on-one lesson.

Congratulations to the regional advancers

Without naming schools, three of the regional advancers from the strings category were students from institutions that take their music programmes seriously enough to invest in dedicated string staff and ensemble time. The investment shows. KMF is one of the clearest indicators we have of which schools are doing music well, and the schools getting it right are the ones treating it as a real subject rather than an after-school filler.

To our own students who entered this year — well done, all of you. To the trainers preparing students for the next round — we're cheering for you. To anyone whose school is considering whether to take KMF seriously next year, the short answer is yes, and our festival coaching programme exists precisely for this. Get in touch if you'd like to talk.