Who This Is For
What You'll Learn
The conventions of a student concert, from the warm-up room to the applause, for players and for the people watching.
- The walk on, the bow, and settling at the instrument
- What to do when something goes wrong mid-piece
- Audience rules that matter, including when to clap
Almost every concert convention exists for a practical reason: it makes the playing better, or it stops someone else's performance being ruined. Here is the set that matters at a student concert, for the people playing and the people watching.
before you get there
Warm up at home. A hall is for playing, not for fixing a passage you never learned, and a student practising loudly backstage is a student rattling the four people waiting to go on. Arrive earlier than feels necessary; traffic here does not care about the running order. Eat something small beforehand, because nerves and an empty stomach together make hands shake.
Dress so you can play. Pianists in a new outfit discover the sleeve catches on the keys, drummers discover the shoes are wrong for the pedal, guitarists discover the strap does not sit over a stiff collar. Try the outfit at the instrument once before the day.
the walk on
Walk on at a normal pace, stop, face the audience and bow. Then sit, set the bench height, put your hands in your lap and take one breath before you start. Those four seconds look like confidence and are actually a checklist: feet right, bench right, music right, hands ready.
Do not start playing while the audience is still moving and clapping. Wait for the room to go quiet. The silence before you start is part of the performance, and a student who waits for it is already in charge.
From The Door To Your Seat
Find the teacher, check your position in the running order, then sit down and stay found.
No practising in the hall. Listen to the students before you. It settles the nerves better than fidgeting does.
Walk, bow, sit, breathe, wait for silence, begin. Keep going whatever happens in the middle.
Hold the last note, hands off, stand, bow, walk off. Then back to your seat for everybody else.
when it goes wrong on stage
It will, eventually, and the only rule worth memorising is keep going. If you miss a note, carry on. If you lose your place, jump to the start of the next phrase or the next section and pick it up there. Do not stop, do not restart from the beginning, and do not apologise to the room.
The audience is not following a score. They notice a stop, a grimace and a muttered sorry far more than the wrong chord that caused it. Students who learn to recover in public stop fearing the mistake, and that is most of what performance training does.
the end of the piece
Let the last note finish. Keep your hands on the keys or the strings until the sound has died, then release, then stand. The temptation after a hard piece is to leap up and flee, which chops the ending off.
Bow even if you are furious with how it went. The bow is a thank-you to the people who sat and listened, and it says nothing about how you played. Then walk off at a normal pace and go back to your seat.
Groups in Band Club or the community choir follow the same sequence, with one extra rule: agree before you walk on who leads the bow, and watch them.
in the audience
Clap at the end of a whole piece, not between its movements or sections. If you are not sure whether a piece has finished, watch the performer's hands and shoulders rather than the person next to you. For a student concert, clap the same for everyone, including the nervous eight-year-old who played eight bars.
Phones go on silent, not vibrate. No flash. Record from your seat if you want to, held still and low, without standing up in front of the family behind you. Do not walk in or out during a performance; wait for the gap between students. If a small child needs to leave, go then. Talking during a piece carries much further than people think, and the player can hear it.
Stay to the end. A hall that empties after your own child has played is the one thing that genuinely takes the shine off the day for the students who are still waiting to go on.
the night before, for parents
Run the whole sequence at home once: walk in, bow, play the piece from start to finish without stopping, bow again. Do not stop them mid-piece to correct a note, because the point of the run-through is the not-stopping. Pack the music, a water bottle and the right shoes the night before. And keep the feedback afterwards to one sentence. They know how it went.
If the worry is the nerves more than the manners, nerves before you play has a routine for the week before and the minute before.
four rules for concert day
- Warm up before you reach the hall, not in it.
- Keep going. An audience forgets a slip and remembers a stop.
- Bow at the end even if you hated it. The bow belongs to the audience.
- Clap at the end of a whole piece, and clap the same for every student.