Springs Means...

it's recital time. Chances are, you know someone with a Recital From the Dark Side tale. You know the one: getting up in front of everyone and completely blanking out at the beginning. Or blanking out in the middle. Sadly, those experiences leave deep scars. I know. I have had my share of those experiences too. One of the most devastating (at the time) was actually not in a recital, but my first Sunday playing the organ for church as a teenager. I was probably around fourteen. Our choir was singing a gorgeous arrangement of "A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief." I lost my place on page two and found it again on page eleven. I sat down after the song and cried. I was sure nobody would ever forget. Well, my parents don't remember. Even the choir director doesn't remember...and I have asked her! I have also literally fallen on my backside performing in front of thousands of people while touring with the BYU Ballroom Dance Company in China. The only person who remembers that incident as well as I do is the guy I sat down on (I don't think his forehead has a scar...). But what I try to reassure all of my piano students about is that it is okay to make mistakes in front of people. I tell them everyone in that recital hall is anxious for them to do their very best, and rather than feeling laughter when someone has a tough moment, everyone feels anxious right along with the performer. And in one year? No one but the student will remember the brain freeze. And perhaps believing that will help make those Dark Side performing experiences a bit less painful.

I have to say, too, that some of my most memorable experiences have come through performing music. I will never ever forget accompanying that same ward choir on the piano for a Christmas program in which we sang the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's Messiah. I was so absorbed by the music. I wasn't ready for it to finish. I very nearly leaped up from the piano bench to shout, "Let's do that again!!!" I may have had to grip the piano bench and clamp a hand over my mouth to restrain myself I was so excited when it finished. That endzone happy dance you see football players do after a touchdown? That was how I felt. Another time I felt bowled over by a performing experience was conducting the music in a general session of Women's Conference at BYU. We were in the Marriott Center singing "Let Us All Press On." I was standing there on the front right corner of the stand on the Marriott Center floor leading 10,000 women (I'm not kidding...it was probably more)in singing this rousing hymn. Being in vocal synchronicity with 10,000 women made me feel like we could walk out those doors and fix the world. And those are the kinds of experiences I hope my students will be able to have. I want them to feel that incredible sense of power and synergy. It takes a lot of hard work and practice to feel confident enough with your music to allow the feeling to envelope you. That is risky...to let the heart take over in that instant, but it is empowering when you can enjoy an experience like that.

Sometimes those experiences are very quiet. My last recital as a teenager was like that. I played Debussy's "Claire de Lune" in a library recital hall. I remember it raining outside and feeling like the music and the rain were one. It happened again at a dear friend's funeral, when I was accompanying and improvising as one of his nephews sang. It happened just recently at my son's baptism when I was playing in the chapel while we waited for Justin and Liam and two other boys and their dads to come in for the confirmations. But they're still just as powerful. Thomas Carlyle says it best:

"Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite."