As the title says, has anyone had any experience of playing in the same concert as their children and how did they (both parents and children) find it?

I am supposed to be playing in the same end of year concert as my daughter on Wednesday. It is the first time my daughter will ever have played in a concert and I really don't want to transmit my own hang-ups about performing to her. I was initially going to say that I didn't want to play but then decided that this was probably worse as I wouldn't be able to give her a convincing reason as to why I wasn't playing.

Not quite sure if this is the sort of thing you're asking but my son and I did a three song set at a folk club last summer: For one of them I played guitar and he sang, for the other two we sang a-capella duets (our own arrangements). In one we just did two parts, same words. In the other he sang lead treble and I did backing bass as 'bom be doo-be-do-be" etc. It was the last open-mike evening at the club that summer holidays and we were one of SEVEN parent/child duets on the bill! We all had a lot of fun!

My friend's dad was playing in the christmas concert with the woodwind group and big band last year. She didn't seem to mind that much, she was more occupied with her nerves at the time!!!

Sounds like you had fun.

I suppose what I was really asking is for experience from people who are hopeless performers. I tend to go to pieces completely when I am playing in public but I don't want my daughter to get the feeling that it is a traumatic experience - I would like her to feel that performing is something normal and fun. She is quite like me in personality and has said several times that she is feeling a bit nervous about playing. I have told her that it is normal to feel a bit nervous but that once you start playing your neves disappear (this is totally untrue for me). I'm worried that I will communicate my nerves to her while we are waiting.

She's only ten so she hasn't yet reached the age where it is potentially embarrassing to be doing something with her mother.

A few years ago I accompanied one of my sons, then aged ten. He was playing violin in a little local competition. Of course the piano accompaniment was much harder than his part but well within my capabilities. Well, I completely messed up my bit! I mean, really messed up, not just an odd slip here and there. But he soldiered on quite unperturbed and actually won first place in his section with a commendation for his musicalty ... despite mum's terrible showing!
I think I hadn't prepared mentally for the performance aspect for my own playing, and then the extra pressure of not wanting to let him down.
That at least spurred me on to reading more about preparing for performance and have since performed in several recitals; not without nerves of course but with a reasonable amount of confidence that it is possible to play in spite of them.
I'm not sure if that's what you want to hear!!

Maybe one thing you could do at this late stage is to practice going wrong! I mean, take it in turns a couple of times (not too many!!!) to deliberately mess up and work out what your strategy will be. I know you don't want to plant fears in her mind, but if you've been telling her that her nerves will go away when she starts playing and they don't, then what?

My nerves just get worse when I start playing but we're not playing together - we're both playing duets with our respective teachers. I have told her that a duet with a teacher is the best way to start as it doesn't matter how many mistakes you make, your teacher will manage to sort things out (at least mine always has (and sometimes I have played so badly it makes me cringe to think about it) so I don't see why hers wouldn't).

The reason I told her that nerves go away when you start playing is that the school she goes to has an arts project which means that each year every class gets to work with either a professional dancer or actor who helps the class to put together a "performance" (for want of a better word) which they perform several times in professional theatres. She has said on several occasions that although she feels very nervous beforehand, once she is actually on the stage, her nerves disappear.

Oh, I misunderstood! That's a different kettle of fish. Playing duets with your teacher is a great safety net!
Can your teacher help you with your nerves? A book I found extremely helpful was Philip Johnston's "The Practice Revolution". In particular the chapters called "Making the piece reliable", and "Preparing for performance". It's written for teachers but I wish I'd heard these ideas years ago when doing exams.
Good luck on Wednesday!

My teacher has been incredibly patient about my nerves and believes that learning to play in public is just as much a part of learning to play an instrument as the technical side of actually producing the notes. He says that if I have such trouble with nerves now it is because no one really bothered to help me with them when I was younger, which I think is probably true. (My teachers used to either just say everyone gets nervous, or to stop being ridiculous when my nerves got really out of hand). I have posted on another thread a fairly comprehensive list of all the things my current teacher has suggested to help with nerves. I am slightly better than when I was a teenager in that I am no longer physically sick before performing but, with one exception, I have always played appallingly badly.

I don't know the Practise Revolution so I will have a look at that.

I tell my kids/pupils to try and look on the funny feelings before a performance as excitement instead of nerves. It seems to work for some of them. As a teacher, I almost always start my pupils off with duets as a first performance. It's so much easier to support someone if you are sitting beside them and playing together. And if the worst happens, you can both stop and try again!

There is no doubt that your attitude will rub off on your offspring. Perhaps this is a powerful enough motivator for you to maintain a calm exterior and convince yourself that you are just going to get up there and do it. After all, if it goes wrong, you know that your teacher wil help you and if you carry it off with aplomb, that will be an even better example to your child of how to cope with mistakes etc. (Sorry, that's probably made you feel 10 times worse, but I often find I can pull myself together for my kids, when I would otherwise be a wreck..)

I once saw a little boy and his mum (both beginners) play a duet on the piano in a concert. It was the cutest thing I ever saw.

If you don't want to perform, Kerioboe, then you don't have to.

BUT.....
I don't know how bad your nerves are but do you think it could help your daughter to see that you are feeling the jellywobbles too, that it is all part of the process, and that, even if things don't quite go to plan you can both have a laugh about it afterwards?

I can quite understand you not wanting to put your daughter off. Teacher duets though are pretty good as first performances as teachers tend to have a good knack for making almost anything sound like it should have happened in the first place.

Could you both bribe yourselves with a particularly good sticky bun/ice cream/other special treat on the way home if each of you thinks the other did OK?

Do encourage your daughter, it sounds like she's making great strides at the moment.

After only 1 year of lessons, I played in the Chester Forum get-together on clarinet, playing a piece my 11 year-old daughter played for her grade 4 exam in July last year.

She played a grade 3 piece on bassoon as exam practice for March.

I completely muffed the first bar, forgetting to use the speaker key, so what should have been C above middle came out as F below middle C!!

I just laughed it off, knowing that I was only doing it for fun meant it didn't really matter - I think I'll be more nervous at Stalybridge this time round, as I'm planning to play one of the pieces I'm doing in my grade 4 on 7th July.

However, she seems to be getting more nervous about playing to an audience than she was when she was younger - maybe it's a puberty thing?!

Previous years while waiting to play I imagined I was maintaining a calm exterior but apparently looked so pale that not only the teachers but even some of the younger pupils noticed.

I'm hoping that this might be the case for me too.


I know I don't have to perform but this is my one concession each year to my teacher's insistence that it is possible to learn to perform and that he considers helping me to overcome nerves is part of his job (his opinion not mine). The concert is in the children's ward of the local hospital and involves four instrumental teachers' pupils who all pay duets, trios or quartets either with each other or with their teacher. As he rightly pointed out this is about the least threatening place and way to perform you can imagine. Because I have played there for the last two years my daughter automatically assumed I would be playing again this year with her and I didn't think it woud be a good thing to say to her that I wasn't playing because she is.


Nerves mean that a lot of the low notes don't come out and I invariably end up playing very flat (sometimes as much as a semi-tone) and the worst thing is that I can hear I am flat but can't manage to put enough breath down the instrument to do anything about it. Unfortunately neither my daughter nor I have the sort of personality which means we laugh about playing badly.


This is why, if I must play something, I would go for a duet any day and I keep telling my daughter that it doesn't matter how many mistakes she makes or how long she takes to take a breath (she's playing the trombone) her teacher will cope.


They provide fruit-juice and biscuits afterwards but I will have to rush off with my daughter as she has a string orchestre rehearsal immediately afterwards which she can't miss as her first orchestral concert (on the cello) is the next day.

I'm sorry, I slightly misunderstood your thread, I assumed it was going to be your first one of these performances as well as your daughter's - no offence intended!

No need to apologise. I should have explained things more clearly in the first place.

Well, in the end things went better than anticipated. I had a lesson in the morning in which I managed to "play out" a lot of my nerves. Meanwhile my daughter took her instruments into school and played to the rest of her class (something she had never done before) and she was on a high from that.

When we got to the concert venue a friend of mine, whom I hadn't seen for months, was there to listen to her son so I spent the time waiting chatting to her instead of stressing about what I was about to play. My daughter played first (and perfectly) and her post-performance wind down was to want to leave immediately and she wandered off into the courtyard and didn't even bother to listen to me playing (she'd decided she'd heard me practising it enough at home already).

I concentrated on not seeing the audience and, as my teacher had suggested, playing everything as loudly as possible and, although it was not perfect, it was by far the best I have ever played in public. (The irony of deliberately ignoring all dynamics was that one of the other teachers congratulated me not only for having got my nerves under control but also for playing so much more expressively than last year).

It has made me think that perhaps, there is some hope of breaking out of the vicious circle of being apprehensive about making a total mess of things and consequently making a total mess of things and therefore increasing the apprehension ...

Well done Kerioboe!

Heh.

Well done, kerioboe - here's hoping this is the start of cracking the performance thing Having hope that you might crack it is a good start

Well done, definitely sticky bun time!