I had a recital on Saturday night. I had hoped to be writing about the preparations leading up to the event, but I have been working so hard to finish preparations for the recital that I didn’t have time to write about them. Now, however, with the recital done, I have time to reflect on the event, and the preparation leading up to it.

My first thought is simply, “Wow, that was fun!” I was a bit nervous leading up to the recital, more nervous than I have been about anything recently. When I stopped to consider why I felt so nervous, it struck me… I haven’t played a complete trumpet and piano recital since sometime just before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. I have had many concerto performances, performed on portions of recitals, and also done a fair bit of chamber music, but I haven’t actually played a complete recital. This is unfortunate, because in the end it was a really artistically satisfying event.

In many ways, playing a recital is the polar opposite of being an orchestral musician. When you play in an orchestra you are told what to play, how to play, when to play it, what to wear, and where you will play. No one consults with you; no one asks if you think this program will be effective. Someone decides all of these things for you, and your job is to show up and play them to the best of your ability.

When planning a recital, though, you get to pick the whole program. You can decide what direction you want the program to take artistically: should it be all modern pieces, or should you mix in some classical and baroque music. Maybe you should do an all-baroque recital, or perhaps you should write or arrange something yourself? Bottom line, you can do whatever you like. You simply pick a program that you think will be the most effective, and then begin preparing it.

On top of that, you get to decide how you want to play everything on the recital. If you want to capture a certain character with the music, you do it. You get to choose the dynamic, articulation, phrasing, tone color, tempo, and any other musical aspect you can name. In short, you are the musical dictator, and let’s face it, being a dictator can be pretty fun. The only people that don’t like dictators are the people being dictated to, which is surely why orchestra players seldom like conductors. It’s really a power thing. Whatever. All I know is that is fun to have such enormous control over your artistic effort. I think it is really the thing that has always drawn me to music, and the fact that I have so seldom taken advantage of the opportunity to program a complete concert of music, and exercise my own right to control my artistic effort is a shame.

In the future, I will put a great deal more focus on planning concerts and presenting them. Performing for a few hundred appreciative people on Saturday reminded me of how rewarding this experience can be, and quite frankly, I can’t wait to do it again.

Saturday, March 4, 2006.

Recital featuring:

Craig Morris, trumpet
Paul Schwartz, piano

Program:
Arthur Honegger – Intrada
Samuel Barber – 4 Songs, opus 13
Paul Hindemith – Sonate
Ned Rorem – Cries and Whispers
Eric Ewazen – Sonata

Why didn’t you go? Oh wait, that’s right, I forgot to tell youabout it. Sorry about that. My bad. Next time I promise to let everybody on here know. Really, I will.

As of 9:40pm, March 1, 2006, with the conclusion of my recital, the second of three requirements for my Masters was finished. The first part was the class work and the third the writing of a thesis…. However, my point is what I have learned from this recital is that you cannot take it too easy prior to performing the show.

About a year ago, early 2005, I put together the pieces for my recital. Three months later, I found an accompanist. We worked for about eight months to fine-tune the material. Roughly a month prior to the recital, we were able to play through the entire repertoire twice in one day, with a run-through in the late morning and again in the early evening. This was a good feeling for both of us, at this point the endurance was there and so was the music. What hit me hard was the fact that I decided to take it easy about a week and half prior to the recital date.

Do not do this!

I lost some of my regular endurance, my comfortable range dropped about a minor third, and the last few rehearsals were feeling more like labor instead of music. Ok, it is a recital, and you have your teacher, colleagues (especially the trumpet studio all sitting together in a row, purposely in your line of sight), professors, family, friends, and if you are lucky, random people attending the concert. No pressure, right? Well, it is pressure, and my decision to take it easy made me lose some of the confidence that I built in the last year in learning the pieces.

My point, keep to your regular life, do the normal every day playing. If you do an hour warm up, keep doing it and if you do breathing exercises, keep doing it. I decided to reduce some of my fundamentals in fear that I would use too much of my strength and energy and have no gas for the show. Wrong. Regular practicing is the gas station where you fill up to have gas to do a show. The reduction of daily playing made a stressful situation, the recital, even harder. I finished it successfully, with some better then expected moments. The next day was when the recital really hit me. I woke with my body aching all over, especially in my lungs and diaphragm area. This is most likely from an intense focus on my breathing when the playing was not working as smoothly as I would have liked. Four days later, I have finally calmed down and healed from the recital and am back to normal life. I am still kicking myself for taking it too easy, hence this article.

When doing a recital, keep to your regular life schedule and treat it as another gig, although a very challenging one. I have done so many unusual jobs that my practicing schedule is designed to prepare me for the unexpected. However, the recital was expected and it felt like I was not ready for the unexpected. I hope my thoughts help, and remember to have fun when playing. I actually did that a few times in the recital and I think it saved me.

Kevin Miller