Surprise!

Sometimes the comfortable pace isn’t what serves your students best.

I’m about to surprise my students tonight with the program for Monday’s concert. I’ve programmed a piece that is ready, but they don’t think is ready.

It’s going to require work – work for me, work for them – to get it done. But it’s the best way I can think of to get them back into acceleration mode. With five weeks till our end-of-year extravaganza, we can’t coast, we have to pick up steam. And that means…surprise!

They will be apprehensive, but they will also get the work done; and with that step, they’ll be on their way to a more effective use of the next five weeks.

Just a reminder that the pace is set by the director: we don’t follow the ensemble’s pace, we guide it.