Groove it Up at Your Recital

Spring is in the air! Piano and voice teachers everywhere are in final preparation mode for their Spring Recitals! Today’s post is all about making recitals special.

I’ll be sharing TWO free resources with you today, so be sure to keep reading!

After listening to an awesome podcast about “Hosting Great Student Recitals,” I decided to shake things up a little bit this spring and do something different.

What was different? Well, we started out with a little “mood music.”

Click to Access on Spotify

As my students walked into the recital hall, I had a fun mix of upbeat music playing in the background. Louis Armstrong… OneRepublic… Bruno Mars…

Why this kind of music? Why not Classical or Baroque?

I could have made a list full of pieces like Für Elise and Die Forelle, but I wanted something that would put my students at ease and get them into a fun mood. “Pop” music fit the bill just perfectly.

Now I’m sharing that list with you!

If you’re a Spotify user (it’s free) – you can get access to my 2016 Recital Playlist by following this link, or by clicking on the picture above.

Using something else? Here are the screenshots of my recital playlist so you can get some ideas!

(Keep reading… there’s another FREEBIE at the end of my post!)

What other fun things did we do? Every student got a raffle ticket – throughout the recital I pulled numbers and gave away t-shirts and iTunes gift cards. It was SO much fun to watch their faces when their numbers got pulled!

We also did a 50/50 raffle to benefit a local pet rescue center. A representative from the center set up a display table with “pets” (stuffed animals) that you could adopt, and they gave away pinwheels and chocolate paw prints.

That cute little poodle now lives in my studio!

All of these great ideas came from listening to the Full Voice Podcast. Fun stuff, huh? I never would have thought about doing these things… thanks for the inspiration, Nikki!

What did the students and parents think? They loved it. I received lots of positive feedback after our recital this year! I’ll definitely be “bringing the fun” to more recitals in the future.

Here’s another easy way to make your recitals memorable…

Send your students home with a fancy certificate! These are perfect to hand out at the end of the recital when you call all your students back to the stage for a group photo.

(Make sure you put them in order so you call them up in the order that they are seated. I speak from past “experience.”)

Click to Download the FREE Editable Recital Certificate

FREEBIE: Here’s a little certificate I made up last year… I’ve created an editable PDF where you can input the name of your studio/recital, the teacher’s name, student’s name, and date.

These print two-per-page, helping you save on ink AND paper costs!

This editable PDF will save you SO much time writing them out by hand. Make sure you have the Lucida Calligraphy font installed. (This comes standard on most computers.)

Click HERE to download the editable PDF.

Best of luck to all the teachers out there who have recitals in the upcoming weekends!! I hope your recital is full of FUN!

How do YOU make your recitals fun and memorable? Leave your ideas in the comments below!

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