National School Orchestra Association (NSOA) records

The National School Orchestra Association (NSOA) was an organization founded to further the cause of school orchestra teachers in the United States, with two of its missions being to increase the status and quality of school orchestral instruction compared to school bands and to give support to school orchestra teachers leading string or full orchestras. It operated from 1958 until 1998, after which point it merged with the American String Teachers Association (ASTA). ASTA, founded in March 1946, was intended to further the interests of string playing in America, focusing on performance, research, development, planning, and teacher training. Yet by the late 1950s, there was a growing feeling among public school orchestra directors that ASTA was not addressing itself specifically to their needs, instead focusing its energies and resources on the interests of college/university and private studio instructors. As a result, NSOA was formed in August 1958 from a meeting of interested orchestra directors held at Interlochen, MI during the annual ASTA summer conference.

During its tenure, the Association published an annual bulletin and hosted a composition contest, and membership included a subscription to the Instrumentalist, a rival publication to ASTA’s American String Teacher published by Traugott Rohner, a founder and the first president of NSOA. In 1971, NSOA became an affiliated organization of MENC (the Music Educators National Conference, now known as the National Association for Music Education, or NAfME), wherein MENC membership was a prerequisite for NSOA membership. NSOA collaborated frequently with both ASTA and MENC on various publications on string instruction and repertoire, including The Complete String Guide (1988).

Despite their origins as separate entities, the idea of merging NSOA and ASTA in order to combine their resources to serve string and orchestra teachers had been around since the early 1970s, though it did not come to fruition until the 1990s. In April 1992, ASTA president Robert Culver initiated a meeting between the executive boards of ASTA, NSOA, the Suzuki Association of the Americas, and the International Society of Bassists at the ASTA National Convention. During a 3-hour meeting, the leadership of these groups discussed potential collaboration opportunities and agreed to continue emphasizing the importance of string and orchestra education in schools and communities. Upon his election in 1993, NSOA president Robert Greenwood remarked that the organization was at a place where change was a necessity and posited “the possibility of creating a new organization...a more effective umbrella for all orchestra teachers and studio teachers.” A proposal by the NSOA executive board was submitted to the ASTA board in the spring of 1994 concerning a potential unification of the two groups, with the general consensus being that string and orchestra programs would benefit from a more unified voice. The proposal was approved, and the Association moved toward transferring its memberships and resources to ASTA. After forty years of operation, NSOA was officially dissolved on July 1, 1998, and the new organization officially became “ASTA with NSOA.” “NSOA” disappeared from the title in 2006 for legal reasons, but ASTA has since continued to support the mission and objectives of NSOA brought to the organization with the merger.