A Year without a Holiday Concert…

December in a public school music program usually means one thing: controlled chaos disguised as festive community engagement. If you’ve never lived through a school concert season from the podium side, here’s the standard rundown:

• Putting musical band-aids on the parts students still can’t play.
• Rewriting parts on the fly to rescue kids who didn’t practice or missed too many lessons.
• Hoping and praying the beginners will somehow be ready for Hot Cross Buns.
• Moving 4 timpani, a concert grand marimba, a smaller marimba, a xylophone, a bell kit, a snare drum, a bass drum, several cymbals, a set of tom-toms, all their stands, a rolling percussion cabinet, a keyboard, and a rolling keyboard amp… from the basement to the first-floor stage. Oh — and 30–40 chairs and music stands.
• Securing the gym (our beloved gymatorium) for a few days of stage time.
• Teaching kids how to get on and off the stage.
• Preparing scripts for the student MCs.
• Finalizing the online program and printing posters with QR codes.

And that’s before concert day.

• Concert day itself usually includes:
• Trying to warm up and tune the band, only to have them sit twenty minutes before going onstage.
• An AM rehearsal for 300–400 Pre-K through 3rd graders who cannot stay quiet for more than three minutes.
• An afternoon rehearsal for 400–500 older students who are fully capable of silence, but seldom interested in demonstrating it.
• A steady stream of emails about concert attire — even though the permission form went home two weeks earlier. (I won’t see those emails until the next day anyway; my laptop lives onstage running tracks and graphics.)
• The evening performance, hoping everyone shows up on time… and honestly relieved if they simply show up.

And, of course, the curveballs:

• A fire drill in the middle of tech rehearsal.
• Surprise: the entire 7th grade is on a field trip.
• Sarah’s cello fell over and is now in two pieces.

Last March, on the day of the spring concert, I tracked over 17,000 steps before I got home. It’s a wild day, every time. But somehow, the students always pull it together.

They rise to the moment.

They surprise you — and themselves.

And you walk out exhausted but proud, wondering how you survived another year.

The truth is, a concert doesn’t start in December. It starts in September. In our pull-out program, I don’t have a guaranteed class period. I make a lesson schedule and hope the kids show up. Preparing students for a performance takes months even with a consistent class. With pull-outs, it takes months — and nerves.

Professional musicians rehearse once and then perform for months. In schools, it’s the opposite: months of preparation for one single performance.

A December Without a Concert

December is now halfway over, and I don’t miss the panic and mayhem that usually define these weeks. Going into this year, I was looking forward to a simple winter season. Instead of handing out holiday music during the first week of school, we spent time reviewing fundamentals and getting back into a consistent rhythm. I had time to assess each student more carefully, create skill-based groups instead of instrument-based ones, and hand out a wide variety of music. Some pieces we’ll perform, some we’ll practice, and some we’ll simply explore. Without a looming deadline, a few things shift:

• You can pause and explain instead of plowing through material.
• You actually finish lesson plans instead of triaging them.
• Musicianship becomes a conversation, not a casualty.
• You notice subtle improvements usually lost in the December sprint.
• Absences don’t derail everything — even with my chaotic November (a break, an illness, and Thanksgiving), I only taught eight days last month.

I’m looking forward to a spring concert where students not only perform well, but know they’ve grown as musicians.

This year, instead of a looming performance, the goal is steady, ongoing progress.

Do We Perform Too Much?

I’m not arguing to eliminate concerts — far from it. Performances matter. They build community, they motivate students, and they create memories.

When I taught high school, my Jazz Ensemble performed hour-long restaurant sets — twice in one night — before sitting down to their own feast at a local spot. We toured D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. We visited jazz clubs and heard artists like Jon Faddis, Jon Batiste, and Sean Jones. Those students needed the stage. Seeing professionals live pushed them to be better musicians.

But at the elementary level, it’s worth asking: How many performances do we actually need? And at what cost to instruction, pacing, and confidence?

I dislike glossing over essential concepts because a concert is a week away. And I’m lucky — I only teach instrumental music. Many colleagues teach both instrumental and general music. If a student misses a lesson for a math test, that’s it; the lesson is gone. A winter concert can easily swallow four weeks of curriculum. That’s a month of reacting instead of shaping, rushing instead of deepening, rehearsing instead of learning.

Sometimes a strategic pause does more for a program than another performance opportunity.

Did I Miss It?

Honestly?

Yes and no.

I didn’t miss the logistics, the scrambling, the feeling of rehearsing on borrowed time, or the adrenaline spikes at 3 PM, but I did miss the proud faces, the applause that tells students, “You did it,” and the way kids stand a little taller afterward.

Most of all, I missed the motivation a performance brings — especially for my more advanced musicians. If I had a guaranteed daily class where no one could opt out halfway through the year, I could sustain that energy internally. But with a pull-out program, kids don’t always show up. They’re juggling deadlines in other classes, and band becomes the thing they believe they can postpone indefinitely.

My beginners are thriving — consistent, motivated, showing up. The older students? They need the concert to make the work feel real.

I began the month convinced that skipping the winter performance wouldn’t affect me or my students. I was grateful for the breathing room. But I can’t teach the kids who aren’t in the room.

Teaching without the concert feels peaceful — and sometimes lonely.

Teaching with the concert feels electric.

Both have value. Both teach something different.

What I’m Taking Into Next Year

Experiencing a December without a performance gave me something I didn’t know I needed: perspective. It reminded me that music programs thrive on balance — not nonstop performance cycles, not endless technique drills, but a rhythm between the two.

Next year, I want to protect more instructional time. I want students to feel confident before they feel rushed. I want concerts to feel like celebrations, not marathons. And I want December to feel a little less like disaster management and a little more like music education.

Closing Reflection

This year, December didn’t roar — it whispered.

And in that quiet, I heard something I had forgotten: Music doesn’t need an audience to matter — but students need an audience to help motivate and inspire them.

Will the winter concert return next year? I hope so. I have some ideas that I think could strike a balance between teaching and performing and this break helped bring those ideas to light. But this December? The stillness did us some good. It showed me that my students need real-world performance experiences — not to prove anything to the audience, but to help them feel like musicians.

This article is republished from my own Substack where you can read more related articles about music education and explore my non-musical articles about philosophy, my reading, and life.