Caleb Wins His Piano Competition!!!

This weekend Caleb got to compete in the University of Utah's SummerArts Piano Competition. It is a piano competition held at the U for kids and adults school age up until college. The main contest is a performance competition, but then there are various other "skills tests" you can take as well to win prizes.
Caleb competed in the performance category and then took 2 skills tests; Sight Reading and Theory. He would have to compete with all kids age 10 and younger, so it was going to be difficult to go up against kids 3 years older.

He played 2 songs for his performance, and then had to play a few lines from some music he'd never seen before, and then he had to take a Pre College Theory Entry Exam.

Here he is waiting to go into his Performance competition to see the judges:


He had to go in alone to all these events, so I'm not sure how he did. I could kind of hear from behind a door sometimes. For the Theory Test it was a standard test for all ages up to college age, so when he went in the room of mostly teenagers and above they all laughed to see such a small little boy. Poor kid!

We knew Caleb was a pretty good sight reader, so we hoped he could at least place, and we figured not too many kids in his age group would attempt the theory test, so we hoped he would win something there, but we didn't think he would place in performance because of all the kids competing and mostly they were all older and more experienced.

Well, the results came in and we were super surprised that Caleb won 4 awards! He won 2nd place in Sight Reading, 1st place in Theory, but then 1st place in Performance! I couldn't believe it! There were at least 30 kids competing and I saw them and could hear them behind the door and they were good! This was Caleb's first time at this and he is so young and he won?

And--on top of everything, Caleb won the top prize for his age division, The Iron Man award which is for the best all around competitor who had the most points. This was also incredible because usually the Iron Man award goes to the one who entered the most events, and there were 5 events and he only entered 3. So his points must have been pretty high.

On Saturday we were invited to go to an awards ceremony at the U to see him receive his awards. Out of about 20 something or so kids, there were only 14 who placed, and as you can see from this picture, Caleb was just this little boy on the end:

It was so neat to see all these kids bigger and older than he was and yet they kept on announcing "Caleb Spjute" as the winner. Here is a little video kind of cut and pasted together of each time he was announced:

We were so very proud of him! And, on top of all that, they also announced that they had picked Caleb to play in a special solo performance winners concert at the University of Utah at the end of August. Wow! What a night!

Caleb won some cash prizes and gift certificates, but he was most excited for his award certificates. Here he is with them all lined after the ceremony:

Caleb loves getting piano certificates. Up until now he has only received "participation certificates" but now he has real winning ones. He couldn't wait to get home so we could frame them and put them up on his wall:

Very nice indeed!

Well, if you are interested in what he performed for competition, they had a sort of "Practice Competition" Recital the week before and here is a video of his practice performance:



We think he is awesome! Way to go Caleb!!!