The dos and don'ts of concert conversations.

Why does a cheerful, chatty teenager morph into a melancholy mute when faced with an audience? My job as a clinician for the Milwaukee-based Piano Arts Competition has been to effect that transformation in reverse. The founder of the competition, Sue Medford, was prescient: she saw, long before others, that the coming generation of musicians needed to be able to speak, as well as play. So she incorporated a novel element into Piano Arts auditions: students are required to talk about the pieces they will perform. My job has been to work individually with the contestants to prepare that portion of their auditions.

After doing this for a number of years, I've noticed a curious evolution. For the first couple years, students learned about their pieces and composers, wrote out speeches and proceeded to read them. The competition organizers caught on to this temptation and directed students not to read their talks. Bingo--problem solved. Sort of. Now the talks are memorized and recited, rather than read. Worse yet, as the Internet has moved from curiosity to mainstay of daily life, students have ceased to consult libraries and whole books. They happily settle, instead, for "sound-bites," and often blithely include in their talks, concepts and terminology they do not understand. The idea of conversing with, instead of talking at, an audience is still a very foreign one. As I work with the students, I find my primary job is to persuade them that the audience is actually interested in them--who they are and what they think. That does put a certain responsibility on them to think interesting thoughts, but these young pianists are no slouches.

Over the years, finding that I repeat myself too frequently, I've often wanted to issue a set of commandments and admonishments that students could study and maybe even memorize, reciting them to me before the competition! I urge you to share these "commandments" with your students, setting up opportunities at studio recitals for your own young orators to hone their skills.

Concert Conversation Commandments

1. Thou shalt not read your talk--or even surreptitiously glance frequently at notes.

2. Thou shalt not memorize a given text and recite it. No matter how perfectly you know it, you'll sound like one of those automated phone messages that barely resembles a human voice.

3. Thou shalt never, ever use someone else's words in your talk. Even if the words are anonymous ones on that most anonymous of human inventions, the World Wide Web, they were thought of by someone, and that someone wasn't you!