Music on a Cold Winter's Afternoon

My students had a music recital at the Riverhead Library this afternoon. Even though I'm not the one performing (except for a little accompaniment), I get so nervous...by proxy, I think. I am always headachy and exhausted afterward.

Now, 10 hours later, the music is still buzzing through my head, and there's this lovely feeling of accomplishment. Another successful one down, how many to go???

One of the joys of being a private teacher is that I get to totally design my own curriculum, without any Big Brother adminstration peeking over my shoulder, and no "state standards" to satisfy. My students and I can explore pieces, composers, and styles of our own choosing, and the recitals are always a delicious blend of the result. Some students even compose their own pieces to perform. J.S. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven sit side-by-side with Joplin and Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, with a little Ibeniz and Paige & Plant thrown in for good measure.

I absolutely love that electric ripple that runs through the audience when a particularly talented student plays a well-prepared piece, chosen to impress. When a 7-year-old, whose feet don't even touch the floor, swinging gently in the air beneath the piano bench, pounds out Beethoven's "Symphony No. 5", I can hear little gasps echo around the room. And then, when a 5th grader zips through "In the Mood", of the Glenn Miller Orchestra's fame, I can feel the people smiling without even looking out at them. Later, when a little boy deftly fingers the classical guitar piece "Malaguena", moving from soft, frenetic fingerpicking to driving Spanish style strumming, the energy pulses through the room with the beat of his hand. Piece by piece, the listeners are absorbed in the performance, finally sated with the last dramatic chord of "Rhapsody in Blue."

ahhh...another day's work is done...