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Ringmastering your Studio RecitalNo matter how good your ringmaster skills, your recital will still have the effect of a general anaesthetic unless you’ve completely embraced the idea that there’s an enormous difference between a teaching piece and a recital piece. Teaching pieces need to be good for the student. Recital pieces need to be good for the audience. It’s certainly possible to find pieces that can do both, but if you want your audience engaged and applauding, you have to at least get the latter right.
This means thinking a little differently when you’re scouting potential repertoire. If the piece is destined for your studio recital, then quirkily memorable is preferable to pedagogically defensible. You’ll be looking for pieces that delight, mystify, seduce and surprise, which means you’re going to have to hunt outside the usual feeding grounds (See the IMT guide to finding great repertoire)
When I’m not writing articles for IMT, I’m a taekwondo instructor, and the same thing holds true for any public demonstrations my class gives. We don’t just select things that we’re doing in class anyway, we choreograph and tailor the content specifically with demonstration in mind. It’s not pedagogically the most useful exercise to spend 10 minutes smashing boards and doing the most spectacular looking self defence drills we can think of, but it makes for much better viewing than the often repetitive, patient, slow motion, highly technical drills that we do in class so that we can do all this other stuff.
In short, don’t show them what you do. Show them what’s possible.
In cricket mad Australia, one of the biggest regular headaches facing any captain is setting the batting order. Where do you put your strongest players? Do you get them in early to dictate terms from the outset, or protect them from the freshest bowling and toughest conditions? What about that otherwise gifted player who seems to be in the middle of a form slump?Do you hide them for the time being, and bump them down the order? Or send them in as you normally would?
However mysterious you might find cricket, know this: the batting order for your recital is critical, and worthy of much more attention than it usually gets.
Do you open with the student most likely to give a reliable performance? Or the cute 5 year old (for the “awwww!” factor)? Or with three students who are all giving their very first studio recital? Or their last? Or maybe warm up the crowd with one of your Wildcard performances?
If you’re introducing each performance - and you should be - how easily will you be able to segue from this item to the next? Are there three pieces in the middle of the programme that are all in the same key? Or the same tempo? Is there a “dead” spot of several consecutive uninspiring performers/weak repertoire items in a row? Can you rescue it with smarter introductions, or do you need to separate them? And where do you schedule that one student you’re worried about who is most likely to screw up? Or that gifted student who, like our batsman above, might be brilliant, but seems to be suffering a form slump at the moment?...
Ordering your concert program needs to be done with the same sensitivity, iterative shuffling, what-if-this-were-to-be-moved-here detail as determining the seating arrangements for a function at which the Secretary General of the United Nations would be present. If questions like those listed above are not keeping you awake at night in the week leading up to getting your programs printed, then you can't complain if your recital ends up containing Periods Of Dull.
While the focus so far has been on what the concert items are, when they should appear, and how they can be talked up, this tactic is about generating curiosity. It’s so simple, but will have everyone in the room scratching their heads and whispering conspiracy theories to each other:
Instead of students wearing their Sunday Best to the recital, they need to wear the colour you request. So on the day of the concert, because you told them to, some students will be in red, others in blue, others in yellow; you’ll end up with a rainbow of colours that have been assigned, and they presumably mean something…but what?
As the concert progresses, the audience will be paying extra attention as they try to figure it out. Why is this child in yellow? How come my child is in red, while the student who has the lesson after them, and is a similar standard, is in purple? And how come there’s only one student wearing black, and so many wearing brown?
Go on. Admit it. As you're reading this,you want to know what it's all for. So will the audience. It’s a little thing, but they'll be hooked; the concert now has a subtext, and until the puzzle is solved, time will move faster for everyone in the room.
That's up to you. The beauty of this idea is its reusable: every recital can have the colours signifying something different.
For example...
Red could mean “A fast piece!”, while blue might be “Something slow.”. Green might be in between, while black might mean “Crazy Fast!”…or……you get the idea.
By half way through the recital, the audience either will have figured it out, or you will have made the announcement that solves the puzzle for them. (You can even foreshadow that you will be solving the mystery half way through the recital, and that very unveiling then becomes an Point Of Interest in it's own right...yet another reason to be engaged as the concert progresses)
... the audience now is engaged with each new performer even before your introduction starts, because the colour coding tells them sometime about the student. This student is playing their very first concert (awwww!). This student is playing the only rock piece of the night (nobody else is wearing blue). That student is dressed to play a Crazy Fast Piece (I wonder when she’s playing? And I wonder just how fast Crazy Fast is?)
Now instead of counting down 23 performances until they can go home, they’re counting down 4 performances until the Crazy Fast piece, or 5 performances until the Piece That Nobody Has Ever Heard Before, or 2 performances until the Piece That The Student Composed Themselves.
It's all part of the same idea: that all these parents have been to studio recitals before, but they’ve never been to one as unpredictable, creative and engaging as yours. Why would they want their children learning anywhere else?
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