Three More Tips to Make Your Next Concert a Hit

When I grow up, I want to play on a
stage with that cool of a backdrop!

Greetings! Last time I shared three things we did (outside of rehearsal) to make our recent concert a hit. But there was still a few other things I wanted to share, so here we go with part two!

Keep Dead Time to a Minimum

If there's one thing that kills momentum, it's the time it takes for one band to leave the stage while another one sets up and gets ready to go. Find ways to keep this dead time to a minimum.

One of the best productions I know of is the West Texas A & M Music Showcase. It's a thee hour long program, not including intermission or the pre-show, and there is absolutely no down time. The audience barely has time to applaud before the next act starts. And each act typically does one piece. 

This is accomplished through staging. Large groups take the main stage while two smaller stages in front of it are used for ensembles. Lighting directs your attention to the group that is about to start. Groups work quickly to rotate backstage so that everyone is in place as soon as the group before them sounds their final note. It's amazing. It's also a collegiate showcase, and we're in the business of public school.

You can accomplish something similar if you perform in a gymnasium and have enough chairs to seat all of your bands from the get go. Of course, a gym is far from an ideal concert venue. If you have an auditorium you're surely going to use it.

So to minimize downtime, we planned and rehearsed the stage transitions. Each group had a designated space in the audience closest to the side of the stage they would be entering on. So, for example, 5th grade was on stage when the concert began. They exited stage left, and as they were leaving, 6th grade entered stage right. After they performed, they exited stage right while the high school band entered stage left. We got the transition from 5th grade to 6th grade down to about a minute.

We also had a couple of elementary students perform a song on piano in between bands, but I didn't have them start until the next band was seated, so that there was no dead time between the piano solo and the next band. Everything was scripted. Everyone knew their place and when to move, and I signaled just to be sure. It took some thinking ahead and some extra training for the students, but the effort was well worth it.

Open With the National Anthem

One of my mentors, Dr. Reginald Houze, when discussing programming, once stated that you should always open with either the National Anthem, or a fanfare, or both. I always liked that idea. After all, practically all big events start with the National Anthem. The problem was simply staging. I couldn't teach it to my first band (5th grade beginning band), and I certainly wasn't going to have the HS band on stage just for that number before getting off stage to make way for the 5th graders. 

One of my friends down the road went the route of having his other two bands play their program, and then open the high school part of the program with the National Anthem. It might seem slightly out of place, but hey, at least it was there! For my money, it was much better than not having it at all. And the upside was, it took little preparation as it was the same arrangement they used in marching season.

So I considered that, but I really wanted to open the concert with the National Anthem. After the previous years concerts, I wanted to make a bold statement along the lines of, "Hey, we mean business!" I wanted the audience to understand that this concert was important enough that we would start with the national anthem, just like at the football games. 

So I decided to remedy the staging by cutting it down to a brass quartet. I couldn't find a pre-written "Star Spangled Banner" on the internet for brass quartet for free, much less one that was a good fit for my students, so I had to modify a MIDI file of a string quartet version. There were mistakes at the performance, but it was also a last minute addition. I had them playing from the balcony, and afterwards they simply found their seats with the rest of the band. Even with the mistakes, I'm glad we did it. It added a lot to the production, and next time we'll already have it written out so we can rehearse it as much as we need to.

And we'll have a new tradition for our concerts and our top brass players!

Use a Slide Show

This was a small touch, but again, anything we could do to up the production value, I wanted to do. I had a friend run the slide show for me during the concert. 

A welcome slide greeted the really early birds. 15 minutes before the concert they saw a rotation of 5 slides, each a minute long, including things like special thanks, info about the reception, music advocacy statistics, administration, and so on. 

After that it was pretty basic. The slide simply said the name of the act on stage, except during the HS Band portion, in which every piece had a slide with the title and composer, ending with a "Thanks for coming! Please join us at the reception!" slide.

This actually expanded from a smaller idea, though. One of the pieces we played was a 9/11 tribute, which we tied in to the 10th anniversary of the attacks. Better late than never, right? After all, we couldn't do it in the middle of marching season. But I digress...

During the song, every two measures, the audience got a different 9/11 related picture. It progressed from a shot of the twin towers in the morning, to a few images of the attack, and mostly focused on the aftermath. Memorials and the healing process. I told the band that we wanted the music to move them to tears, but just in case, the combination of the music and the pictures would definitely do it. And I'm glad I took the time to do it, because it was the talk of the night!

But even though I don't plan to make that a regular occurrence, I do intend to keep doing basic slide shows.

One of the pre-concert slides I forgot to mention was "Concert Etiquette Tips". I'd heard the crowd was always very inconsiderate, coming and going and talking during the music. I've read that we should make it a point to educate our audiences, and this was the option I took. Between that, talking to the students about it, and having faculty members to monitor the 5th and 6th graders, I thought the audience was really fantastic. 

Better presentation, audience, and another chance to insert music advocacy information... what's the downside? Some extra time to throw the slide show together? It's worth it.

The only other thing I poured a lot of energy into was the programs. I designed the cover page in photoshop and had it printed on nice legal paper, then did the inside (which included sponsorship ads) in Word. That took a tremendous amount of energy, but they looked fantastic, as close to professional as I could muster, and it doubled as a fundraiser. 

I didn't want to make a separate point of it, but the overall idea is simple - I set out to make every aspect of our concert classy. I wanted it to be elegant, special, top notch. Most of that work was spent in preparing for and working hard in rehearsals. But I wanted to make sure the production value matched or exceeded the music quality. We're trying to rebrand this band from its poor image in previous years, to make it into something that is truly special. The concert had to reflect that in every way I could manage. 

We have an awful lot to do to manage a program successfully. This took two months of planning and preparation. And I juggle a wife and two kids in addition to the elementary and high school music program. I admit, there were other things that sometimes fell by the wayside. While important, I chose at time to prioritize the production of the concert. Because again, if we're not focusing on making our performances (including our at home concerts) as successful as possible, then what are we prioritizing instead?

I hope these two blogs have given you some ideas. Is there anything else you do that I haven't tried or mentioned? Please share them in the comment section! 

Thank you, as always, for reading. Until next time, take care!

Musically yours,

Mr. Cooper