Tag: education

Lazy Sunday CXXXII: Christmas Concert Reviews

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The major professional highlight of the Christmas season for yours portly is the annual Christmas Concert at school, a time-honored tradition that is frequently honored in the breach (leave a comment and I’ll explain what I mean by that).  It’s a huge undertaking for myself and my students, but when everything clicks, it makes for a truly magical experience.

Here are past posts about Christmas concerts from 2021-2023:

Happy Sunday—and Merry Christmas!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Lazy Sunday CXXXI: Chapel Lessons, Part II

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It’s another Lazy Sunday, and another look back at some of my short chapel devotionals:

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Concert 2023 Review

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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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TBT: Joy to the World

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Somehow, I have not reblogged my 2019 post about “Joy to the World,” one of my favorite Christmas carols, in four years!

I’ve always loved the bouncy, joyful nature of this piece, and I almost always program it for our annual Christmas Concert.  Indeed, this year my Middle School Music Ensemble students performed it.  While we’re working on the piece, I always give my students a little speech to try to get them into the spirit of the piece.  Essentially, I tell them to imagine what it would have been like to be a shepherd on that starlit night, and for a heavenly host of infinite singing angels to burst suddenly into the sky, belting out “For Unto Us a Child Is Born!”

Our goal, I tell my students, is to capture some fraction of the overawing joy and majesty of that moment when we perform “Joy to the World.”

With that, here is 10 December 2019’s “Joy to the World“:

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Lazy Sunday CXXX: Chapel Lessons, Part I

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Sometimes I fill in for our chaplain at school, which I always treat as a humbling opportunity to share some bit of biblical wisdom with our students.  I can only pray these seeds fall onto fertile soil and bear fruit:

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Phone it in Friday XLIV: Christmas Concert 2023

The Portly Politico4 Comments

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:

  • Middle School Music Ensemble
  • High School Music Ensemble
    • “I Wish You Love” by Icelandic jazz songstress Laufey
    • “On Christmas Day”—a piece that one of my students wrote and arranged himself!
    • “O Holy Night“—the best Christmas song ever written

Merry Christmas!

—TPP

SubscribeStar Saturday: Showtime!

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It’s the busy Christmas season for yours portly, and last night I made it over the first of two major humps before Christmas break:  the Middle School Christmas Play.  The next hump is the Christmas Concert for my own students, which is this Friday, 8 December 2023, in the morning.

There is a tremendous amount of work that goes into the play, as our school particularly loves to stage light-hearted musical comedies.  You wouldn’t think that a musical would involve substantially more tech setup than a typical play, but it makes the work exponentially more challenging.

The Drama teacher this year did a fabulous job, and created one of the most tech-heavy productions I’ve been involved with so far.  It was a multimedia extravaganza:  songs, choreography, videos, backing tracks, lights, around twenty-five microphones (stationary/hanging mics, floor mics, individual headset mics, wireless handhelds, etc.), and more.

Here is a panoramic view of my sound booth about ninety minutes before the play:

MS Christmas Play 2023 Panorama

The astute observer will note two sound boards/mixing consoles, plus a lighting controller, as well as my $80 refurbished laptop, which does fine if I’m just cuing backing tracks, but otherwise runs like a potato powering a lightbulb.  There’s also the spotlight, two lighting trees with around ten lights each, and a projector screen.  During the production my student assistant and I had to move a projector into place, along with a auxiliary cord running to a DI box, which fed via XLR (microphone) cable to a “snake” onstage, which ran all the way back to us at our booth.  We also had to move a baby grand piano (don’t worry—it was on wheels)!

Setting all of this stuff up is stressful, because it’s usually done in fifty-minute snippets of planning periods.  But the finished product is worth it.

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Chapel Lesson: Being Thankful in the Storm

The Portly Politico1 Comment

Right before Thanksgiving Break I prepared a chapel devotional for school.  It went undelivered, as our regular chaplain returned after weeks in the hospital.

It turns out that he had a large tumor along a major artery, and nearly bled out and died on at least two occasions.  He has been diagnosed with stage four cancer, and has already begun the usual regimen of chemotherapy and radiation.  Please lift up Father Jason Hamshaw in your prayers.

While I did not deliver this message, it seemed apropos to Father Hamshaw’s diagnosis, and something we all need to remember from time to time.  Here is my message on “Being Thankful in the Storm”:

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Spooktacular 2023 Preparations

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Yours portly is knee-deep in preparations for the annual Spooktacular, which kicks off tonight at 6 PM.  The Spooktacular has become a hotly anticipated event, and while I’ve failed at a number of enterprises lately, the Spooktacular is a marquee event that my students and their families enjoy.

As a longtime dilettante and fulltime slob, I’m not the best housekeeper.  My energies are expended on other endeavors, like this blog, my teaching, and my private lessons.  The last thing I want to do after a long day of mind-molding is clean the toilet or vacuum the carpet.

My parents’ and grandparents’ generations were neat freaks.  They’d scrub the baseboards with toothbrushes and risk their lives to second-story windows.  I scrub so poorly, my dentist regularly warns me about gingivitis.

But even I succumb to the overwhelming sense of shame that comes from having company over in an unkempt house, and as I want these people to keep giving me money to touch their kids—and as I hope to avoid my father’s dismayed disapproval at my dirty baseboards—the Spooktacular forces me to deep clean.

I’ve been doing a lot of it lately.

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