End-of-Year Concerts

My first end-of-year concert was the Rosecrest orchestra concert. I stayed at the school after rehearsal because it wasn’t worth driving all the way home just to turn around. We went first because the band went first last time. I was missing two out of eight kids, both advanced: my cellist and my best player who’d begged to be named concertmistress. That left only two advanced kids and four beginners. 

Just as we were starting, one kid’s bridge collapsed. It had been off-center for a long time, but it wasn’t something I wanted to try fixing myself. To replace a bridge, you have to loosen all the strings (a LOT), forcing it to be majorly out of tune. Still, I managed to get the bridge back in place and the violin retuned. Then, less than a minute later, it happened again. She was in tears and this point, and I just had to laugh. I told her something like this happens at every concert. I got it fixed and tuned again without breaking anything. So our concert started a little late. They played all right. It was a huge relief to be done.

Next was the Copper Hills Concert. It went pretty well. We also missed a couple kids. The advanced trumpet did his solo but stopped in the middle because he just forgot a fingering. He was pretty upset, and I told him not to worry about it; it happens a lot and what he’d played sounded great. I should have made him practice repeatedly at the last rehearsal because knowledge tends to flee under pressure.

The Hillside/Orchard concert was on the last day of school (after Sara’s and Deven’s graduations). We were unable to do it at the school, so we used the music store. I could have sworn it was at the Jordan Landing store, but it was at the Sandy store. And I told all my band kids to go to Jordan Landing. I guess that was the glitch for this concert. So the orchestra went first despite the plan for the band to go first. I was missing a few kids. They all did a decent job. I love all my music kids, but it was such a load of stress gone when it finished.

For our last class, we had a party. At Rosecrest the kids gave me a little bouquet of flowers while we had snacks outside. At the Copper Hills party, they chose to stay inside so they could play haunted house on the stage with all the lights out. At Hillside, it was just the most quiet kids who came, so it was a group of introverts trying to party. We went outside and played Taboo and snacked.