The difference between student and professional musicians is in how they react to surprises in performance.
I am sometimes asked whether I could put together our Rockford Choirs Cabaret show with student players rather than professionals.
The answer is, kind of.
Could they learn to play the music? Certainly? Smart, well-trained high school musicians could certainly play the music I prepare for this show, and for most shows of this nature. It would need more rehearsal – rather than 5 minutes per song, you might need 30 minutes per song. So that’s a sixfold increase in rehearsal time, meaning many more rehearsals.
The biggest challenges for student musicians are the surprises. Just today, during the shows, we added extra 4-bar vamps on the fly, followed a singer as she jumped around her arrangement, reacted to a dropped or added beat here and there, and generally just rolled with any surprise that came our way in performance.
It generally took no more than a nod from the players, and once I spoke a couple of bar numbers out loud to make sure we were together. That’s how professionals react to surprises in performance.
Student musicians would need a lot more guidance to help navigate those surprises, if they even could.