I’m NOT against Christmas – I promise
Those who know me well know I have a strong faith in Jesus Christ, and Christmas is an important holiday in that faith, but I quit doing Christmas concerts decades ago.
So much is happening in December already!
Everybody seems to be putting on a performance. Every school group. Every community group. Every church group. Everyone! It creates a very busy time.
When I was in the Colorado National Guard Band, we had a yearly Christmas concert. We would book a 500+ seat venue, give away close to that number of free tickets, and then find we had an audience of 80-100. It was a bit discouraging! Not just because of the low audience count, but also because we spent a lot of our rehearsal time on this music.
We discussed this after one disappointing season and figured out much of this was because of how busy people were. We changed to a Veteran’s Day Concert. The first year we nearly filled that 500 seat auditorium! The next year, we had to schedule 2 performances to handle the demand.
Another plus was that the music we rehearsed and performed for the November concert could be reused in January, February, and other performances that might come up.
When I taught at the high school, it took me nearly a decade to develop this schedule, but here’s what we would do…
November was the first concert of the season. The first quarter was devoted to many marching and pep band events. Even though not everyone was in the marching band, this took the pressure off trying to have our first concert in October, which has often seemed too early to me. During that time, I had a few admin who wanted to see a performance every quarter. I would give them a list of our marching band performances 1st quarter. None of them ever questioned whether everyone was involved in that. I took an “overall program” approach. At the November concert, I would try to program one of our large group pieces – maybe the most difficult of the pieces.
In December we would take small groups out caroling around the school, usually during the week before Christmas break; sometimes in conjunction with the choir.
In late February we would have a Large Group concert. In this concert, we performed the 2-3 songs we were playing for large group, I would hire a clinician to listen and provide feedback on the stage after the concert. The clinician had a microphone so parents could see the process. I asked the clinician to fill out the judges sheet, but that was just for me. Parents really loved getting a behind the scenes look at what would happen.
We would also have a solo and ensemble concert. Everyone who had signed up would take part. The curtains would open with 10-12 acts already set on stage, and they would just perform one after the other. Parents (and students) loved this one as well.
In April we took part in large group festival.
May found us having our final concert. I usually tried to schedule this fairly early in May, which allowed us 2 weeks or so to have a more relaxed rehearsal schedule where we worked on graduation music. This particular group typically performed grade III and IV songs. For graduation we usually played grade II music.
At our final concert, we tried to perform the music for next year’s marching band show as a closer. Even though everyone wasn’t planning on being in marching band, this gave us a head start on preparing the music as all the upperclassmen in marching band the following fall would have performed the music. On another note, we had already had drum major auditions and the next year’s drum majors would conduct.
James Divine is a retired music teacher. He still teaches half time at a charter school, spending the other half leading Professional Development and creating curriculum like Jazz From The Start to teach jazz and improv to young students. Get an early edition of his book Almost Everything I’ve Learned About Teaching Band.