Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive. To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more. For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.
The last Spring Concert of yours portly career (at least in its current iteration) is coming up this Tuesday, 28 April 2026. It’s my swan song as the music teacher at my little school, so I’m going out big.
This concert will be the biggest, most stacked concert I’ve ever programmed. It will feature a total of twenty-six (26) pieces (appropriate, since it’s 2026, but I did not plan it that way; I just realized the connection while typing this post)—ten selections from the Middle School Music Ensemble; three solo pieces; one small group performance; and twelve tunes from the High School Music Ensemble.
The Middle School Music Ensemble’s set takes about forty minutes from top to bottom, and they’ve played it all the way through every day this past week. The High School Set is a bit longer, and we have not been able to play the entire program in a single class period. A class period at my school is about fifty-six minutes; by the time we get through attendance and tuning, we have maybe fifty minutes remaining. Our best run yet was getting through ten of the twelve pieces.
As such, I’m estimating that the total performance time of the concert will be about two hours—100 minutes between the two Ensembles, and about twenty minutes for the solo and small group pieces. That’s about the upper limit of where I (and, I imagine, my administration) would like to go. Factor in some shuffling between pieces and what not, as well as transitioning students on and off the stage, and we’re probably looking at around two hours and fifteen minutes.
There’s always this weird pressure to rush on through these concerts. My point (and the one I’ll make to my admin if they object to the length) is that we routinely have sporting events that last three or more hours. Baseball frequently has double-headers on school nights, which can easily run until 9 or even 10 PM. Us wrapping up around 8:15 or 8:30 PM is not going to ruin anyone’s ability to come to school the next day. Frankly, if the admin doesn’t want to stick around (understandable—they have to make an appearance at a lot of events), I don’t mind. I can lock up the building myself (as I have done many times before)!
Ahem—but I digress. No need to get defensive on the front end. That said, it’s going to be a pretty awesome concert. It’s not just two hours of lame filler. We’re going to rock—and pop, and soft rock, and so on—and it’s going to be a fitting display of my students’ talents.
To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.