The KSU Orchestra has been in continuous existence since 1881. The Orchestra is an integral part of the cultural offerings at K-State and offers a creative musical outlet to over eighty undergraduate and graduate students. Nearly half of the members are non-music majors and pursue studies in areas as diverse as architecture, all branches of engineering, computer science, education, anthropology, biology, chemistry, English, modern languages, and human ecology.

The KSU Orchestra tours several Kansas cities in alternate years. It was invited to perform at KMEA in 1992, 1999, and 2002 as well in Concordia, Clay Center, Beloit, Garden City, Salina, Hays, Topeka, Shawnee Mission, and the University of Nebraska during the past several seasons. Members give five concerts each year with an opera or musical performance in alternate years. A faculty member performs a solo each fall and concerto/aria student contest winners are featured each spring. For educational as well as aesthetic reasons, Dr. Littrell chooses compositions from a diversity of styles selected from the three hundred years of orchestral repertoire.

Kansas State University String Faculty

Dr. Cora Cooper, Professor of Music, teaches violin, viola, chamber music and string techniques at Kansas State University. She holds graduate degrees in violin performance from the Eastman School of Music and Florida State University. Her teachers have included Peter Salaff, Charles Castleman, Linda Cerone, Karen Clarke and Eliot Chapo. Before coming to Kansas State University, Dr. Cooper was Assistant Professor of Music at Montana State University in Bozeman. While in Montana she played with the Artemis Trio, the String Orchestra of the Rockies, and was concertmaster and soloist with the Bozeman Symphony. She is the co-editor—with Karen Clarke—of Six Duettos for Two Violins by Maddalena Lombardini-Sirmen, published by Hildegard Publishing Company.

Her work with music by women composers has led to performances/presentations at the Festival of Women Composers at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (1993, 1995, 1998 and 2001) and lectures in the United States and England. Dr. Cooper has played professionally with the Vermont, Austin and Tallahassee Symphonies, the Ling Concert Series (Bethany College), the Early Music Consort (based in Kansas City) and faculty groups at Kansas State University. In December 1999 she joined the Da Vinci String Quartet to record Charles Martin Loeffler's Quintet in One Movement for NAXOS. Dr. Cooper also served as chair of the violin committee for the ASTA String Syllabus.

Dr. David Littrell is a University Distinguished Professor of Music at Kansas State University where he conducts the University Orchestra and teaches or plays the cello, baroque cello, five-string cello piccolo, double bass, and viola da gamba. As a reflection of his interest in the music education of young people, he is the Director of String Fling, an annual event at Kansas State that attracts over 700 string students from Kansas. He also conducts the Gold Orchestra, which includes 75 Manhattan area string students in grades 5-12. The Gold Orchestra toured England in 1997, Seattle and British Columbia in 1999, performed at Carnegie Hall in 2001 and 2006, and participated in the ASTA National Orchestra Festival in Dallas in March 2004.It has appeared at The Midwest Clinic in 1992 and 2010. The K-State Chamber Orchestra toured England and Scotland in March 2008 and Ireland in 2011.

He served six years as Editor of the Books and Music Reviews section of the American String Teacher, and he is Editor of ASTA’s two-volume String Syllabus, the latest revision appearing in 2008. He is the Editor and Compiler of GIA Publications’ three volumes of Teaching Music through Performance in Orchestra. He is the chairman of ASTA's National Orchestra Festival in 2011-2012.

Dr. Littrell twice received the Stamey Undergraduate Teaching Award at Kansas State University. In 1994 the Kansas Chapter of the American String Teachers Association awarded him the Certificate of Merit. He was the National President of the American String Teachers Association in 2002-2004 and planned ASTA’s first stand-alone conference held in March 2003. He was named Kansas Professor of the Year in 2007 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Dr. Littrell adjudicates solo and orchestra contests and is a clinician and conductor throughout the United States.