This is an excerpt from my book, ‘The Useful Musician’, available from Amazon in both Kindle and paperback formats.
WHY IT MAKES YOU MORE USEFUL:
Consistent playing on the same song over and over makes you reliable.
WHAT TO DO:
Be aware that repeated performances of the same song will dull your senses and make you forget things, lose your place, or just plain play dispassionately. Remember that the audience is probably hearing the song for the first time—you owe it to them to play it well. If you’ve identified someplace in the song you tend to slip up on, mark that spot on the music. If you’re getting sleepy between performances, drink coffee, go for a walk outside, do some pushups, eat something spicy—find something that will give you renewed energy. You have to discipline yourself to play with passion and energy every single time you go up onstage, no matter how sick of it your are. You’re a performer.
THOUGHTS:
At The Big Church we used to call this ‘Second Service Syndrome’. We’d rehearse on Wednesday, run through everything on Sunday morning, and the first service would go great. Second service, we’d relax, we’d think, “Hey, we got this!”, and then flub something out of overconfidence. Third service, we’d start forgetting things wholesale because we were tired. I almost always said something on the way out to repeat a service, reminding everyone to be on their toes. In fact, I’d keep an eye on people during the performances, watching for a lapse of attention, giving people visual cues for important parts.
I lost concentration once at a Christmas concert, and even though it was only one performance, it came after a long, grueling day of rehearsing.
It was the big Christmas program, and the People Who Decide These Things had scheduled an entire evening of music, probably twenty songs, interspersed with readings. I thought it was way, way too much. The music for these choral-type songs came from those choir books with piano and four-part vocals all on one page, so you got maybe four measures per page, and sometimes only two. These arrangements would run ten, fifteen, even twenty pages. I was working part time at that point, so I literally didn’t have time to rewrite all the songs into handy words-and-chords charts. I just photocopied everything. A million pages. I taped each song into roughly five page chunks, and when I was done with each chunk, I’d pull it off the piano and throw it on the floor. Twenty songs times three or four long, taped-together chunks—it was a stack about an inch and a half thick. And every time we’d rehearse, I’d have to pick them up off the floor and reorder them. It was making me cranky.
About half way through the performance, a trio of elementary-aged kids got up on stools and did a reading. They’d read, we’d play a song, they’d read some more—it required paying close attention so I could bring the band in and out. My mind wandered.
There was an offering song (instrumental, just the band) and then back to the kids. And then…there was dead air. Nobody was reading, nobody was taking. I thought, “Okay, here we go. One of those kids forgot their part, can’t find their place, and now we have an embarrassing silence onstage. THIS is what happens when you over-program a service. Now one of those kids is going to go home crying, and have a bad Christmas memory the rest of his or her life.”
I was really getting steamed, thinking about what I was going to say at the next staff meeting, picturing one of the kids twenty years later, sobbing out their tale of Christmas woe on a psychiatrist’s couch, when one of the singers turned toward me a little and said, “Let’s all sing that old Christmas favorite, O Come All Ye Faithful”. I thought, “Well, don’t look at ME, sister.” But then a thought—like a dinosaur being bitten on the tail and the nerve impulse taking three minutes to travel to its brain—crept in. Hadn’t we just played ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’? We had. We’d done it for the offertory! And then in a rush I realized what had happened. In an effort to save time, I’d used that song as the offering song, saving myself the time and effort of coming up with yet another song to rehearse. I’d even congratulated myself on being clever. We’d play it as an offering song, then there’d be a reading, then we’d sing the song. Clever, I thought. Except…as we played it during the offering, I threw the music on the floor. And now I needed that music.
There I sat, everyone waiting for me to start the song, and the music was in a pile of papers on the floor next to the piano bench. I had no choice but to lean over, search through the pile, find the multi-page, taped-together sheets, and replace them on the music rack in reverse order. It was a humiliating one-man show, made worse by the knowledge that I’d just spent 30 seconds thinking bad thoughts about everyone connected with this. The whole time, it was me.
So, you know, don’t lose your concentration onstage or you’ll be the one lying on a psychiatrists’ couch.
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