I read the room, and I said confidently, “You’re going to read and learn this entire piece today.”
We’d been building capacity for months: learning many notes, to be sure, but also learning how to learn, learning how the people around us work, learning how to be an ensemble.
The opportunity to push to the next level comes when the basics have been hashed out, and we can start to get some speed under us. My students didn’t necessarily want to learn a whole piece in an hour rehearsal – or even think they could – but the push in that direction showed them just what they were capable of, and got them moving even faster.
I hope that this will lead to more steps, more speed, more music-making. But for now, I’m happy to have just given them the nudge, not by telling them they could do something, but by telling them they would do something.