Inside the Bookstore:
Ringmastering your Studio Recital
or most parents, studio recitals are catastrophically boring. Two hours of earnest correctness from and polite applause for Other People’s Kids, with a 120-second cameo from their own child. Parents turn up because they have to, but as entertainment it ranks somewhere between school speech nights and being on hold for tech support.
But what can you do? An afternoon of Learner-Plate musicians playing pieces that everybody recognises and nobody wants to hear…surely it’s destined for dull?
Not at all. As any reality television producer will confirm, it’s not what’s happening that matters, it’s what the viewers know about what’s about to happen. It’s about subtexts, inside information, and turning expectations into anticipation. The most ordinary of events can be fascinating if you’ve been briefed, and now have a reason to watch.
So compelling and memorable studio recitals are actually less to do with music, and more about your role as ringmaster, as you set about shamelessly messing with the audience’s head. This article will look at some of the more potent options.
There are two types of athlete that we cheer on at the Olympics: those from our own country, and those we know something about. So that sprinter might not be wearing your national colours, but as soon as you find out that they’re the oldest competitor ever to represent their own country, or that they’re a kindergarten teacher for their day job, or they always wear a lucky blue sock in memory of their grandmother, who was their first coach, then it's human nature to watch their lane a little more closely.
To the parents at your studio recital, most of your students are just names. There’s no reason beyond politeness to be cheering them on when they play. But as soon as you tell them something about the performer, they’ll warm, and make the transition from spectator to supporter.
So the first rule is this:
Never, ever let a student just take the stage cold. Always introduce them. Always.
Picture it from the audience’s point of view. You’ve either read “Lucy” and “Melody in Bb”, or you’ve heard the teacher say this:
“Most of you have seen Lucy play before, but it’s amazing that she’s playing at all today. In September, she broke her collarbone and both wrists in an awful bike accident; there was no way she was going to be ready for this recital. So said the doctors. They obviously don’t know how determined this girl is. Ladies and gentlemen, here to play Melody in Bb, and with both arms working, could you please welcome Lucy…”
No matter how only-fifteen-pieces-to-go-until-my-kid-plays bored parents might be, they’ll all be clapping harder and sitting up straighter for Lucy’s performance. And Lucy will be playing better because of the warmth in the room.
Of course, you don’t need to feed exclusively on disasters. Triumphs work nicely too.
“As you watch Albert play this next piece from memory, you might wonder how he remembers so many notes—what you might not know is that he’s been a finalist in the state Chess Championships for four of the past six years, has over 250 openings memorised, and is working towards a thousand. Compared to that, I guess pieces just aren’t so hard. Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Albert…”
And the room erupts with applause. Everyone is looking at Albert differently, and Albert is walking taller for the fact that his extramusical accomplishments have been acknowledged publicly. There’s expectation in the building now, and a sense of connection that simply would not have existed without your prologue.
If you don’t have a student with other talents to highlight, trivia can work just as well. Again it’s all about connection:
“Our next performer might look tall and be in Year 10 at school, but he’s actually only 4 years old. Born on February 29th, he has to wait until leap years to get birthday cards. When you hear him, I’m sure you’ll agree though: for someone who’s not going to turn 5 for three more years, he plays remarkably well…ladies and Gentlemen, Mikael…”
The audience is smiling at Mikael. They’re willing him to do well. He’s not just a name; there’s an intimacy about this now that transforms the experience for listener and performer alike.
The key to this is a little research; to make sure that you know something extra about every student who plays, and then have turned that into a 20-seconds-or-less introduction. Your recital program is then not just names and faces, but a procession of stories; for the parents otherwise stuck in the room with nothing but piece titles and composers' names, it’s a list of reasons to care.
While backstory introductions are a powerful way to introduce each item, foreshadowing is about creating an awareness of—and anticipation for—concert items that are actually some way off yet, so that the audience has Points of Interest to look forward to in what otherwise can feel like a long and homogenous program.
Much of this can happen in your introduction:
“...the students really have chosen some really interesting repertoire for this concert. You’ll hear a piece that was composed in a dream, another that was stolen from Mozart, and another that was banned in five countries. You’ll hear a piece that’s so slow it almost stops, another that’s so fast that you literally won’t be able to see the performers hands move, and another that uses nothing but the same note, over and over, for almost a page, but in a smart, creative way that will really surprise. All this and lots more, packed into 120 minutes: it’s been a great year, and now you’ve got a window seat to the best of what happened…”
Think about this from the audience’s point of view. Instead of a concert program with 23 generic and indistinguishable items on it, you’ve now seeded the whole thing with Points Of Interest.
To dial things up, you can foreshadow more than once. This, as the introduction to the 4th item:
“Now as I mentioned at the start, we’ll be hearing a piece that was stolen from Mozart. That’s coming up in the second half. But before that, right now, we actually have some Mozart. He was only eleven years old when he wrote this…”
You’ve introduced the piece, but also restoked the curiosity fires for the “piece stolen from Mozart”. Of course, by the time that piece hits people will be really curious, but its primary role is as a Point Of interest. This piece is coming soon, hang in there, don’t touch that dial.
Your teasers are little splashes of water in the faces of otherwise snoozing audiences.
Remember, unless you set things up otherwise, recitals have just two points of interest for parents:
• The moment when it’s my kid’s turn to play
• The moment when the concert ends and I can finally go home
Now, with the Stolen-From-Mozart teaser, there’s a third point of interest. In fact, there’s many more, because everything you mentioned in your introduction is now a Point of Interest. Those that you mention more than once will loom particularly large.
You don’t just have to limit such setups to introductions. You can also give booster shots after a performance has concluded.
“For those of you in the audience who enjoyed that, coming up later is a piece that is - hard though it is to believe - even faster. The composer is somebody called Liapunov, and he was actually best friends with the composer of the piece we’re about to hear now…”
There’s the segue, but wait, back up…Even Faster Than The Piece I Just Heard! Of course they’re looking forward to it. They’re all busy trying to imagine such a thing…
…it’s very hard to be bored when the ringmaster is talking up acts that are coming up.
Of course, it’s much easier to use foreshadowing if you have some exciting things to foreshadow. There are some suggestions below; they end up not only being items that the audience looks forward to, but events that stick in people’s minds long afterwards.
These can be former students who have gone on to bigger things, or perhaps a colleague who is a member of your local symphony orchestra. A two-minute talk, a five-minute showpiece, and your students will be remembering it for many, many lessons to come. It won’t inspire all your students, but here’s the thing: it will inspire the right students.
Your guest performer’s time is precious, so don’t expect them to sit through your entire recital. Their arrival is then something you can foreshadow in its own right:
“Ladies and Gentlemen,if we could just interrupt the regular program for a moment—I mentioned earlier that Carlene Montague, principal oboist from the TSO, would be making a special guest appearance at some stage today. I can see she’s just arrived, and when I introduce her in a moment, I’d like you to raise the roof. This lady can really play, and I’m so grateful she’s taken the time to come today…”
The endless procession of students playing their piece at your studio recital can feel like, well, an endless procession. One way to shatter the tedium is with something completely crazy, and nothing does this quite like Insanely Huge Ensembles.
So you might be running a flute recital. We’ve all heard one flute before. Most of us have even heard two or three at once. But I don’t think many would have heard 35, all with different parts…
It’s going to be bedlam and carnage, and probably will be to music what a stock exchange room floor is to conversation, but it’s going to be short, and lots of fun.
All your students would be on stage. Each would have a part tailored for them, so this ensemble can feature your newest beginner alongside your I-can-play-anything stars. You would have chosen something well known, and harmonically simple (you’ve got to write 35 parts, so you don’t want to be arranging Scriabin here). Anything that only has a couple of regularly changing chords will work well—"chopsticks" ,nursery rhymes, a current ad jingle, that sort of thing.
Everyone has their part, you would have rehearsed it perhaps once at a workshop, or maybe never at all, but the whole point is that it wouldn’t be over polished—the parents know that this is everyone, and musically a very, very bad idea. But everyone in the room will be smiling, because it’s such a very, very bad idea.
You can do the same thing at piano recitals by having half a dozen students crammed onto the same oversized piano bench. If you have two pianos on stage, that’s twelve students. Everyone has an octave of their own to work with. There will be elbows in sides, hands colliding, four feet all going for the same pedal like a demented game of foot-snap, and plenty of laughter. The musical result will almost certainly be a train wreck, but there will have been plenty of evidence elsewhere in the program that your students can produce polished performances when they need to. This segment was entirely about reminding all those parents of something that usually isn’t so obvious in stuffy old studio recitals:
Your studio is a fun place to spend time. It’s not all about Correct Posture and whole notes that are exactly 4 beats long.
Again, this is tailor made for foreshadowing:
“Just a reminder, that in the second half, two of the performances will be from students who have done no practice at all. In fact, they’ve never even seen the music before— it’s a first, we’ve never included a sightread item before, and you’ll see it here live soon.”
Who in the room won’t be anticipating that? Everyone will know what a huge ask that is, and the students involved can expect plenty of applause before and after, no matter how well they play.
Back to back. Seriously. Normally something like this would be the programming equivalent of turning up to a party in the same dress as three other guests, but this time you’re doing it deliberately. When you’re foreshadowing, you can remind the audience that while the performers all worked from the same score, they’ve all come up with completely different ideas as to how the piece should be delivered. Sit back, listen to the imaginations at work…
Again, it’s interesting because it’s different.
Students who compose their own works are a rarity (they shouldn’t be, but that’s something I’ll focus on in another IMT article), and so the idea is fascinating for the audience. If you have a student who shows enough courage and initiative to be ready with a piece of their own, then that's definitely worth foreshadowing. The whole room will be curious every time you mention it, and listening hard when it arrives.
Oooh! Don't stop there! Show me more studio recital ideas...