Rethinking the Senior Recital
It was never going to be a typical senior recital. But then, George was never a typical piano student.
When the subject of a senior recital came up, George had been in my studio for nearly a dozen years. During our tenure together, we had had many ups and downs. He was a smart, musical kid, but always struggled with reading and coordination issues. He liked to push back whenever possible, once wearing a Batman shirt to a recital because it met the requirement of “having a collar.” He also, he often reminded me, didn’t really like to practice. In fact, a few years before, during a period in which George was considering stopping piano lessons, he said, “You know, I’m not planning on doing music or piano with my life or anything. But I’m going to stay with piano lessons because I think it might help me with things I like better.”
I am sure he thought he was really sticking it to me that day, but at that moment, George was my very favorite student. Without being aware of it, George had just proved that he had truly absorbed my teaching philosophy and values. The truth is, I couldn’t care less if any of my students decide to major in music or spend their lives chained to a piano bench. All I really want is for them to figure out that the person they are at the piano is the person they will be in their lives at large, and that the musical work they do can teach them who they are. In other words: practicing matters.
Over the years, George and I had reached an understanding about practicing: every week he would put in five days of 35-40 minutes at the piano. This would never make him ready for the Van Cliburn competition, but over time this kind of consistency would pay off. He could become a solid musician.
Most weeks, George made good on our agreement. Occasionally, he’d come into a lesson and sheepishly admit that he had had a bad practice week, but as he got older these lapses occurred less and less often. He was a valued and enthusiastic participant of the required monthly performance classes in the studio, giving pertinent and thoughtful feedback to other students even when the repertoire in question was far more advanced than he himself would ever tackle.
But when the subject of a senior recital came up one day, George dismissed it entirely. “Yeah, I’m not doing that,” he said.
At the time, I let it go. He wasn’t an obvious candidate for a traditional senior recital. He didn’t have a large repertoire of big flashy pieces. He hadn’t been checking off the boxes of standard literature the way seniors who are preparing for college auditions might be. And with only 35-40 minutes of practicing a day, it was a stretch to imagine that he could produce a whole program of music.
And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Here was a kid who had put in twelve good years of piano work in my studio. Like many students who struggle with note reading, George memorized easily. He was a solid performer. Not once had I ever had a moment of concern while watching him on stage. He might fumble a bit, but he always knew what he needed to do. It seemed like a missed opportunity not to celebrate our time together with some kind of culminating project. Although there are many legitimate reasons to give a senior recital—a motivating goal for the final year of high school or a chance to showcase one’s college audition repertoire are two obvious ones—at its essence, a senior recital should be a way to celebrate one’s years of musical work. But was there any way around the traditional model?
Maybe there was. And the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that there might be a way to preserve the spirit of the senior recital if only we rewrote the rules. Instead of playing an expected program of advanced repertoire representing the four major musical periods, what if George prepared a program consisting of his favorite recital pieces from the last dozen years? A sort of “George’s Greatest Hits?”
I waited until the lesson just before the winter break to bring up the idea. George didn’t bite immediately, but he seemed at least intrigued with the concept. I pulled out my notebook of recital programs for him to look through. It was like looking through an old family photo album. “What was my first recital anyway?” he asked as he ruffled through the programs. “I’m not in this one. Nope, not in this one either. Here I am! October 2007! Wow. I played ‘Picnic Time.’ I don’t even remember that one.”
For at least ten minutes he searched through programs reminiscing. “Oh! I really liked ‘King Tut,’” he said, when he found the program where he had played this elementary favorite by Dennis Alexander. “I would definitely like to review ‘Allegro Burlesco,’” he said, citing the flashy Fredrich Kuhlau piece. In the course of ten minutes we had moved from “I would never give a senior recital” to offering up suggestions for a possible program. He hadn’t yet agreed, but this was something, I thought, and a good way to wrap up the fall semester.
George came back from the holidays with some questions. “Could my sister play a duet with me on the recital?” “Could I invite the whole studio?” “Would you do a reception afterwards?”
As far as I was concerned, from this point on, the answer to every question was going to be: Yes. Yes, you can play a duet with your sister. Yes, you can invite whomever you want. Yes, we will do a reception afterwards. Yes, yes, yes!
Now I should hasten to insert here that there were no piano miracles. George did not start practicing three hours a day, but rather continued with his faithful 35-40 minutes five days a week. Our lessons together that final semester, however, were very focused and productive. After all, there was no time to waste. We chose ten old pieces and three new duets and began a scheduled rotation of reviewing and learning. At the last minute we dropped one piece that just didn’t come together in time. He had originally thought that his college-age sister (a former student of mine, and now a composition major) would play all three duets with him. But, in the end, it worked better to have his sister play one, a fellow student play another and for me to provide the second part on the third duet. Small concessions in the grand scheme of things.
And while George didn’t suddenly become a different pianist or musician in the months prior to his senior recital, he perhaps found something even better. He got to relive his childhood through these ten piano pieces, the reviewing of this music taking him back to very specific times in his life. This was a private journey, of course, one that I could only witness in a very second-hand way from my teaching chair. But every once in a while he’d offer me a glimpse. “You know,” he said to me one afternoon, “this piece was really important to me because it was the first piece I played after I joined the high school performance class.” He paused, “Do you remember that I almost quit piano then?”
I remember. One of the things George always “liked better” than practicing the piano was flying airplanes. He spent his senior year of high school working towards his pilot’s license and was planning to major in aeronautical engineering in college that fall. “Someday I might not crash an airplane because of you,” he started teasing me in the final weeks before his recital. “Practicing the piano has probably helped me with my concentration.” I had no doubt.
If it is true that who we are on the piano bench is only a mirror of who we are in life, then watching George the afternoon of his recital (wearing a three-piece grey suit!) I knew the skies were safe. And while it was not a perfect performance (none are, and after all these years, George didn’t need me to remind him of that fact), it was a perfect recital, a perfect celebration of this huge piece of his life and the significant part that piano lessons had played in the person he had become: a far cry from the wiggly, rebellious kid in a Batman shirt.