Putting Together a Recital: Part 1

. . . . . . . . . from Emma's studio

At the beginning of May, I had the opportunity to participate in my first piano recital as a piano teacher. One of my colleagues was generous enough to allow a few of my students to participate in her piano recital. After that experience, I decided to put together my own recital for the rest of my students. Little did I anticipate the challenges I would face…

Challenge number 1: Scheduling. I suppose most teachers just pick a day and tell their students “This is the recital day. If you can make it, that’s great; if not, too bad, maybe next year.” However, I wanted to do my best to make sure that all of my students could participate (since I only had six), so I wound up changing the date twice, after several frantic emails and phone calls.

Challenge number 2: Location. My studio is, as my mom so succinctly put it, “Mom’s living room.” Unfortunately, Mom’s living room is not set up to host four families of students without squishing people together. Fortunately, my local music store offers the use of its facility free to piano teachers for their recitals. Great! Right? Well, we all know what assuming does… I thought I would be free to pick whatever time I wanted. Instead, my choices were 6pm or 6:30pm, and as I was planning an early afternoon recital, these choices left my rather flustered. Oh well, I choose 6pm and made it work. 

The other challenge involved putting together a program for the recital. However, since my time in the education department at Wisconsin Lutheran College made me very adept at Microsoft Office Word and I had several previous programs of my own to use for reference, I skated through that challenge without much difficulty.

Stay tuned for information on the recital itself….


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