When rehearsing an ensemble, one of the challenges is to convince our musicians that they must make the piece not only come to life, but do so incredibly vividly. The best way I have found is to ask them how many times we will rehearse a piece before a performance. The answers range from “too long” to “many.” I then ask them to quantify their answer. And it usually ends up being a large number. I then ask them how many times the audience will hear the piece. That is met with a resoundingly immediate “once.”
It then becomes clear that we must portray the piece – guide the audience through it, if you will – by making our one-and-only performance as vivid as possible. I have found that numerical comparison helps them understand the goal. The bottom line is that the audience will have one shot to hear something that we’ve heard over and over for months or weeks, so we have to make every detail, layer, and aspect of it accessible and understandable.
Peter Loel Boonshaft, Director of Education
KHS America
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