Earlier this week I participated in my school’s annual winter music concert. The music department of the school puts on a concert each year with all of the students participating. In the past, I’ve had the opportunity to watch their previous concerts, but since I now attend the school myself I had the opportunity to perform in it myself.
I would say that the preparation for the concert starts as soon as the school year starts because all of the new students in each of the music classes learn how to play their instruments first. The pieces that we performed at the concert were pieces that we learned within the first three months of us picking up our instruments for the first time. In my opinion, I don’t think it really makes sense for the beginner students to perform though. Most of us haven’t played our instruments before until the start of the school year, but the school still makes us perform in a group of just the beginners. For a concert that some people are paying to see I don’t think we had enough experience or practice to perform.
However, while our beginners’ performance wasn’t great, I wouldn’t say that it was terrible. I still wouldn’t have paid to listen to it though. Fortunately, the senior students were able to put on a better performance than we did. Additionally, we had students from another high school come in to perform a few pieces for our concert. You could tell that their students were much better than our music department when you listen to them play.
During the concert, I also had the chance to perform a solo guitar performance, but I wasn’t originally planning to until around two weeks prior. I didn’t end up practicing too much for it, so I made quite a lot of mistakes during the concert. Some people said I did pretty good, but I think it could’ve been much better.
In terms of the rehearsal that went into the concert, we only had one practice run-through of the whole show. It was quite unorganized and there were a lot of times when we didn’t know where to go between performances. I think it would’ve been better to hold at least one more run-through of the show like we did for the school’s musical, but I guess the teachers couldn’t figure out a schedule.
Overall, I would say the concert went alright, but there are a lot of things that can still be changed to improve it. A few last-minute changes were made, rehearsals weren’t organized, and the overall playing could’ve been better. I felt underprepared when we performed, but it could’ve been worse.