Days and weeks before

The days and weeks leading up to a concert are always a little bit stressful. You plan the repertoire well in advance and then try to balance it out between the kids' preparation and the time remaining.

In all the large classes, I have to figure that at some point the repertoire will be learned, and they'll be ready for a performance. That day comes sooner or later, depending on the group and the music I've picked and how well they've learned it, and most importantly, if they like it or not.

If the students don't have enough time to get prepared, then they won't do well at the concert and their little self-esteems will suffer. Especially the 6th graders, who are sensitive to everything, will be on cloud nine or a pit of despair based on every little thing that happens.

If the students have too much time to learn the music, at some point, a week or two away from the concert, you find yourself nit-picking and going over things again just to fill the time. This spells disaster. If it's anything the kids hate, it's beating a dead horse. They get sick of the music and then nothing you do will induce them to play it correctly, with the appropriate style and spirit.

Nothing.

The 6th grade came closest to hitting that perfect point of being ready right when the time came for the concert. I could feel it happening as we prepared. Repetition of their first song, a little American folk song from their method book, Sawmill Creek, proved to be the key to confidence. Students had time to learn the notes in the safety of the big group, and the percussion players (and I use that term loosely) needed more time to really get what they were doing.

On their other song, the Six Episodes, I felt that coming together right when it needed to. The last two days of rehearsal, on the stage, were for fine-tuning in that environment, as opposed to the band room, which is carpeted and sound-tiled. And for this group, a reminder of how to behave on stage.

The fifth grade was a little less stroctured, the students progressed at such different rates! And as a group, they are learning all kinds of skills all at the same time and having to synthesize them into a one-time-shot performance. So I picked the music I thought they could do well. No sense picking hard songs they won't be confident on.

Even so, the most important thing for the 5th grade was behavior. Drilling them on expectations. It's not enough to just tell them how to act on stage and expect them to do it, you have to actually practice with them so they start to get used to it. So we took a lot of class time, a chunk every day for the last couple of weeks, to practice the concert behavior.

Sigh. My middle-high group crossed the line into beating a dead horse. I felt so bad for them. The were so depressed one day when they left class, because they just hated Festal March (Handel's Festal March from his operetta Rinaldo) with all their beings. Hated. It.

So I let them work on a packet for three days, an assessment of their knowledge of musical concepts, skills, and vocabulary. They were happy to go back to playing after that.

The day before the concert is usually the hardest. It's getting the kids used to being in the concert space, in this case, our wonderful little (as of now, horribly echo-y) auditorium, and they kind of go into chaos mode and it's even harder, because of the chaos and the echo, to get them to calm down.

I learned that if I get them to go on stage right away, I can control them better because they're sitting in a confined space. It just takes longer.

Plus, my mindset is all a-twitter, the day before the concert. I'm excited and nervous at the same time. I wonder how the kids are going to do. This time around, my 6th grade bass drum player threw up in class, on stage. I had not prepared a backup in case he was really sick and didn't come.

The day of the concert, I held classes again in the auditorium. The nervous feeling was starting to go away, to be replaced by a recurring thought: "it will be what it will be." Very existential of me, who is not usually existential, at all.

Read on for how the thing actually went.