Fifteen years ago today, on 4 July 2010, my old brass band, Brass to the Future, played an outdoor concert in a park in my hometown of Aiken, South Carolina. It was a bit of a “guerrilla” concert, in that we did not ask permission, but just showed up in the park and started playing for our fans.
In the spirit of Independence Day, I’m featuring rare footage from that concert today.
Tomorrow night is the big Spring Concert at school, so my kids will playing their hearts out. Indeed, tonight is the school play, so yours portly will be working hard to flip everything from the play over to the concert.
The concert is coming a few weeks earlier this year than last year, but I am looking forward to getting it done a bit earlier in the season. It makes the rest of the school year a bit more manageable.
Not much more to say at this point, but I’ll have a full review of the concert done soon. In the meantime, I’ve got two very long, grueling days ahead of me. Gulp!
With that, here is 29 April 2024’s “Concert Week!“:
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My buddy John and I played our annual Yulestravaganza the evening of Saturday, 14 December 2024. We played a couple of one-hour-ish sets, full of classic Christmas carols, standards, and hits.
The only attendees were the barista and Dr. Girlfriend. One shifty-looking nerd sauntered in halfway through and set at the extreme far end of the coffee shop, apparently putting as much distance between us and our Christmas cheer as possible.
We had a really good time.
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Yesterday my students performed their annual Christmas Concert. It was a really fabulous concert, and I am super proud of my students. Other than some very small glitches—for example, the first soloist on “O Holy Night” came in late (no big deal—we just kept vamping a C major chord until he started) and his wireless mic got a little crackly on the first few words—it went very smoothly.
There are essentially two parts to the Christmas Concert. The first part involves the Foreign Language classes, which perform Christmas songs in their respective languages. I always say that it’s not really Christmas until the Latin students sing “Rudolphus” (“Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in Latin). That part is fun, but it’s kind of like checking a box to me: the Foreign Language students get a grade for singing in the concert, and it means a lot to a longtime Latin teacher for the students of the various Foreign Language classes to sing.
The second part is the real concert, when my Middle School and High School Music Ensembles get to play. Here is the program for that portion of the concert:
I didn’t get too crazy with our programming this year, and a few repeats from last year (“Jingle Bell Rock,” “Silent Night,” and “O Holy Night” are always perennial picks).
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‘Tis the season, dear readers, for yuletide merriment—and all the related craziness that accompanies this jingle-belled time of year. Yours portly is exactly halfway through the middle of two weeks of arts-based insanity, and all is well.
Last night my school’s Middle School Drama students, as well as students from our Dance and Vocal Ensemble classes, gave their annual Christmas production. They performed a cute little play called And a Groundhog in a Pear Tree, in which some of the less popular holidays—February 29th, April Fool’s Day, and Groundhog Day—attempt to write a new version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in order to save the big annual Christmas ball (the titular Twelve Days of Christmas have gone on strike).
This coming Friday, 13 December 2024, my Middle School and High School Music Ensemble students will give their annual Christmas Concert. We have a great program planned. The Foreign Language classes also get in on the fun, with renditions of various Christmas songs in their respective languages. I always say that it’s not really Christmas until the Latin students sing “Rudolphus” (“Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in Latin).
So, here’s a glimpse into the life of a Technical Director for Performing Arts during Christmas, which is crunch time in the performing arts world.
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Tonight’s the night—the 2024 Spooktacular! My students have been working hard on their solos, and it should be a fun night.
I have done a concert around Halloween for years, and started calling it the “TJC Spooktacular” in 2019. At that point, it was pretty much a solo show, with my buddy John hopping on to accompany me on a few tunes (or for me to accompany him).
During The Age of The Virus, I couldn’t find a venue that was booking live music, largely due to concerns about big groups of people in a confined space. So I conceived of turning my front lawn into a seating area and my porch into a stage. Thus, the Spooktacular in its modern iteration was born.
That first front porch Spooktacular in 2020 was not a recital for my private music students, but was instead a more self-indulgent concert: John and I missed playing live music. I also paid a couple of groups to perform as openers: one of my students and his punk band—their first live gig—and two of my open mic music friends (one of whom, Sarah, I did a gig with back in August for her birthday).
Then I began to transition towards the Spooktacular being a recital for my students. That helped to attract more people to the event, but also shifted the tone away from “raucous-but-mild-Halloween party” to “family-friendly Halloween party.” The original Spooktacular was never bacchanalian, but the current recital version is much more focused on family fun. The costume contest also seems to be a big hit among the little ones, too.
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My students’ big Spring Concert was this past Tuesday, 30 April 2024—the perfect way to finish out a super busy month. T.S. Elliott wrote in The Wasteland that “April is the cruellest month,” and for yours portly, it’s true—it’s my busiest month of the year at work, and I always seem to come down with a gnarly sinus infection during the height of it, largely (I suspect) due to exhaustion.
But April is also the coolest month because my students get to showcase their talents at our awesome concert. This year’s concert was overstuffed with goodness, like a really comfortable, worn couch that also produces high quality rock ‘n’ roll.
Perhaps that’s not the most elegant or eloquent metaphor. What I mean is that the concert was long, but good. The length was the result of structural issues: we had to incorporate Dance, Choir, my Middle School and High School Ensembles, and various soloists. Rather than trim the fat (and, to be clear, there wasn’t much fat to trim) and shortchange my students, I leaned into it, producing a concert that was a bit over two hours.
To be clear, my goal is always to get to one hour, maybe ninety minutes. Seventy-five minutes is a good compromise. But with the Choir director insisting on featuring five beautiful but laborious choral pieces, and Dance students doing their arrhythmic gesticulating, it tends to pad out the runtime. My thought is, why should my students suffer because we’ve expanded our offerings in the performing arts?
My administration was not pleased with the length, but as I pointed out to them, it’s the same as going to a varsity baseball game on a Tuesday night, and we never complain about those. Further, my Karen-esque boss hosts two large, lengthy beauty pageants each year, also on school nights, which easily match or exceed the length of my concert. Quite frankly, I’m tired of compromising on this issue. If athletics and the boss get whatever they want when it comes to length of programs, I’m going to pursue the same tactic.
But I digress. That’s material probably best left behind the paywall, but I’m pretty ticked off at my administration right now, and frankly don’t care if they stumble upon this rant. Regardless, the concert was awesome, and my students did extremely well. Seriously, it was the best one yet.
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Yours portly is nearly through the gauntlet. Tomorrow night my students have their annual Spring Concert.
It’s shaping up to be a good one. We’re working in a lot of classics, as well as some newer tunes. I’m particularly excited about the closing number for the concert.
Yours portly will be spending the bulk of today and tomorrow setting up sound equipment and instruments (when I’m not teaching classes). I’ve gotten a lot better at doing this setup over the years, but it’s still quite time-consuming, and I require a good deal of focus to get it done. That’s sometimes hard to achieve in a school full of students!
So I’m hoping to be getting in early the next couple of days to make sure everything is good to go!
Rock on,
TPP
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Eight days ago (Friday, 8 December 2023), my students had their annual Christmas Concert. The Christmas Concert is one of the two marquee concert events of the school year, the other being the more amorphous Spring Concert, which can fall pretty much anywhere between March and April (and even early May). Of the two, the Christmas Concert is my favorite, and while it’s also one of the most stressful days of the year, it’s also one of my favorites.
Our Christmas Concert follows a predictable format, consisting of performances from our choir, our World Language classes, and finally from my Middle School and High School Music Ensembles. Historically, dance classes have performed pieces prior to the musical portion of the concert, but this year marked the first that dances were not included, as the dance class performed before the Christmas Musical, which was on Friday, 1 December 2023.
Honestly, excluding dances was a major improvement. I have nothing (well, not much) against dance as an art form, but it was never a comfortable fit in an already-overstuffed Christmas concert format. It also adds some minor additional headaches for yours portly, who in the past has had to move pianos in the middle of the concert to accommodate the dancers. At the risk of editorializing (but isn’t that the whole point of a blog?), I find most of these “dance” routines to be rather distasteful and a tad lurid, although I am to report that this year’s dance performance was really exceptional, tasteful, and beautiful.
But I digress. What of the music itself? Let’s dig in, like a Wisconsin dad shoveling snow.
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Today is the day of our big Christmas Concert at school. It’s incredibly fun and incredibly stressful, but if everything has gone according to plan, it should go smoothly. It’s worth it to see the kids singing and playing and having a good time.
As I’ve grown older and, arguably, more professional (and almost certainly more ornery and ill-tempered), I’ve scaled back a bit of the theatricality and bombast of the Christmas Concert to something a bit more manageable. Gone are the days of singing while standing on a piano (I did that once, years ago). I also strive to make the concert focused on the kids and Jesus.
One big change this year is that our Dance and Choral students won’t be performing, because they had their performances as part of the Middle School Play last Friday. The Foreign Language Students will still get up there and belt out Christmas tunes in various languages.
I’ll be doing a full write-up one Saturday (possibly tomorrow) covering it, but for today, just pray for yours portly. I’m confident it will be a good concert, I just gotsta get through it!
As a preview, here’s what my students are performing:
Merry Christmas!
—TPP
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