Media Writing: "Why Recitals are Important"

About: This is an article I wrote about the importance of recitals for beginner musicians for the Community Music School of Webster University's email newsletter, the C-Blast.

For those of us acquainted with music lessons, the recital is an event full of pride, joy, and excitement. In many cases, it’s a celebration – a showcase of the fruits of your months and years of practice, of your relationship with your instructor, of what you’ve accomplished and how you’ve grown. However, it can also be a source of some anxiety – How much did you really practice? Are you as good as your instructor’s other pupils? Recitals can cause these questions to swirl around our heads, which in addition to the feat of performing a piece of music while in front of an audience, can make for a somewhat stressful experience.

Despite the potential stress associated with them, recitals are a vital part of learning and loving the playing of a musical instrument. They give students of all ages and skill levels a goal to work toward, as well as a solid due date to learn and polish their chosen pieces by. They also allow students to experience what it feels like to perform in front of an audience – anxieties, triumphs and all. With recitals we are, as students, forced to ask ourselves how to prepare for a live performance, as well as how much to. We also, in most cases, pick out the pieces we perform in coordination with our instructors, allowing us to consider what styles of pieces we most want to perform, or what styles we are most comfortable with. In essence, recitals bring the skills we learn and the growth we experience in our individual lessons into the real world, both in the context of performance versus practice and in the context of in front of an audience versus only one’s instructor.

In addition, recitals let students perform without the stakes of a true concert – almost all recitals are free to attend, while concerts are typically ticketed. Without the cost of entry, students don’t feel as pressured to perform their best to make attending “worth it” to their audience. Recitals offer an inherently more accepting and understanding environment for musicians over a traditional concert. Those in attendance are typically the parents and families of those performing, coming to see and support their loved one(s), and are more likely to understand the amount of effort and passion poured into even beginning student performances.

Like any other performance, recitals make us vulnerable. They demand that we allow a group of largely strangers (or even more horrifyingly, vague acquaintances), to focus their full attention on an intimate showing of not only our skill, but also our passion and dreams. As musicians, we often feel the need to justify our hobbies or careers to others. Pursuing musical excellence is often seen as frivolous, as something only done by the exceedingly wealthy to find a way to fill the hours of their day, rather than what it is – the pursuit of excellence and musical beauty for the sake of accomplishment, enjoyment, and self-fulfillment. Recitals are a celebration of musical excellence and accomplishment, where our passion and our dreams are met not with indignance, but with joy – as they should be.