Tag: music education

SubscribeStar Saturday: Spring Concert 2024 Postmortem

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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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Quick Post-Concert Update

The Portly Politico2 Comments

The concert was a big success.  It was also loooooong—about two hours.  Of course, with performances from dance classes, the choir, various soloists, and my Middle and High School Ensembles, it was bound to be lengthy.  As I pointed out to some folks afterwards, it’s no different than kids who play a baseball game (but, let’s be honest, way more fun that baseball).

I’ll have a full postmortem this weekend, but now, I am heading to bed (at the time of writing, it’s about 10:15 PM the Tuesday evening after the concert).

Back to real posts soon.  Yours portly is just having to do these quick ones to get by for the time being.

Rock on,

TPP

Concert is Tonight!

The Portly Politico2 Comments

The big Spring Concert is tonight!  Yours portly busted his butt yesterday in his planning periods and after school to get everything looking good.

Here was the stage in our gym at around 7:15 AM yesterday (leave a comment if you notice the unusual detail in this picture):

Spring Concert 2024 Setup Before

And here it is around 5:30 PM, shortly before I left work:

Spring Concert 2024 Setup After

Granted, I didn’t work on it continuously during that time, as I had classes, but in total, it was probably four hours of setup.  I had help from some colleagues moving the big stuff and the drums, and some Middle School students setup the lighting (not pictured, but you can see the light controller on the bottom right in front of the stage).  Overall, the setup yesterday—including leaving copies of students’ music on their music stands and pianos—should make today a bit less stressful.

Rock on!

—TPP

Concert Week!

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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

SubscribeStar Saturday: SCISA Music Festival 2024

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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.

This past Thursday was the annual South Carolina Independent School Association (SCISA) Music Festival, a major event for my music students each year.  The Music Festival is an opportunity for students to perform solo and ensemble pieces for judges.  The judges are typically doctoral students at the University of South Carolina School of Music, and they often give excellent, detailed feedback to students.

Students can earn one of three scores:  a Gold/Superior/I; a Silver/Excellent/II; or a Bronze/Good/III.  Even students who earn a Gold/Superior often get invaluable comments (in other words, not just things like, “That was amazing!” without further elaboration, although that does happen occasionally).  While I stress to my students that our aim is to get a Gold on our performances, the real value lies in 1.) challenging ourselves as musicians in the first place and 2.) taking constructive feedback to heart so that we can improve as musicians.

I also make sure they know that simply playing at the Festival is a testament to their courage as performers, as it is very difficult to expose one’s self to criticism, even when that criticism is designed to help us improve.  For me, signing up and working hard to prepare a solo is the most important victory; everything else is icing on the cake.

That said, I am very pleased to announce that both my Middle School and High School Instrumental Ensembles earned Golds for their performances.  The Middle School Music Ensemble performed an instrumental arrangement of Giuseppe Verdi’s “La donna è mobile” from his opera Rigoletto (you can purchase sheet music of my now-award-winning arrangement here, here, and here).  The High School Music Ensemble played the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves.”

Our Choir Director had a great day, too:  her choir earned a Gold, and each of her vocal soloists earned Gold as well.

Here is the (rather dry) update I sent to my administration after school, which I am sure they have blasted out onto social media by this point:

On Thursday, 7 March 2024, forty-two (42) student-musicians travelled to the SCISA Music Festival at the USC School of Music in Columbia, South Carolina to perform adjudicated solo and ensemble pieces. Students competed in the categories of Small Vocal Ensemble, Small Instrumental Ensemble, Large Instrumental Ensemble, Vocal Solo, Drum Solo, Piano Solo, Guitar Solo, and Violin Solo.

The Small Vocal Ensemble, the Small Middle School Instrumental Ensemble, and the Large High School Instrumental Ensemble all earned Gold (Superior) ratings.

Vocal soloists earned five (5) Gold ratings, two (2) Silver ratings, and one (1) Bronze rating.

Instrumental soloists earned eight (8) Gold ratings, three (3) Silver ratings, and one (1) Bronze rating.

In total, students gave twenty-three (23) musical performances, earning sixteen (16) Gold/Superior ratings, five (5) Silver/Excellent ratings, and two (2) Bronze/Good ratings.

The results demonstrate the musical talents of the [school’s] student body, and speak to the cultivation of those talents in the Music program.

So, what does it take to get such results?  Let’s dive in.

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Memorable Monday III: Monday Steakhouse Blues

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Well, it seems that my resolve yesterday to get back to our regular schedule waivered, before breaking down completely.  Yours portly has been exceptionally busy lately—March and April are always difficult, but this February was also quite brutal—and what little creative energy I have has been laser-focused on composing.

I also haven’t really watched any flicks worth reviewing.  To be clear, I have reviewed plenty of bad movies.  Lately, though, nothing has leapt out at me as worth hammering out 600-1000 words.  Maybe Ponty will finally write that rebuttal to my award-winning, trenchant, insightful, powerful, persuasive review of Donnie Darko (1999).

So I thought I’d cast back to an old post about eating a steak alone on a Monday night while using my cellphone to write a blog post.  I wrote the post on the eve of the annual South Carolina Independent School Association (SCISA) Music Festival, which is one of the marquee events of our music program.  It’s a huge and chaotic undertaking, but super fun, and I love seeing my students get ready to perform.

I’m pretty on-the-ball this year, but that on-the-ballitude accounts, in part, for my poor posting—I’ve been working ahead on school and Music Festival stuff.

There probably won’t be any steak tonight, but there might be Thursday after I get back from the Festival.

Regardless, here’s 9 March 2020’s “Memorable Monday II: Monday Steakhouse Blues“:

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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:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Concert 2023 Review

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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.

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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