Today I want to talk about school concerts during a pandemic.

School concerts are always a stressful time for music teachers. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the demand of today’s music teachers due to the uncertainty surrounding transmission risk, potential quarantines, and protecting audience members and performers alike.

The unpredictability of running school concerts in a pandemic has impacted many music teachers (myself included!) In this post, I’d like to reflect on my own experiences of planning a concert in a pandemic including the successes and stumbles along the way.

My school concerts did not go as planned!

When it comes to concerts, I’m a perfectionist. If you read my Concert Planning For Music Teachers post, you’d know that I’m a meticulous planner. In spite of all my planning, COVID-19 continued to change my plans without warning. Here are some things I did NOT plan for…

• Constant changes of plans regarding live concerts
• Absences of entire classes, students and/or teachers
• Subbing for another music teacher last minute!

All of the above happened at one point or another.

The pandemic was constantly changing the plans

Planning for school concerts during a pandemic taught me to expect the unexpected. It seemed like each week I had a plan, my district changed it. First it was live streamed, then it was taped, finally my district settled on live performance with restrictions…

The Safety Restrictions We Used…

In order to limit capacity, my district decided to split the concert into two performances. This afforded us a smaller audience size at each performance. Furthermore, we also sent home tickets (2 tickets per family) so that the audience would hopefully end up around 150 people for each performance. In order to secure our tickets, I printed them on colored paper and put numbered stickers on the back. I also included a holographic sticker in hopes of making them difficult for anyone to duplicate or copy.

As a policy we did not provide additional tickets for anyone. I attached a letter with information about the concert to the tickets. In the letter, I advised families to keep the tickets in a safe place. Inevitably, I did receive emails claiming to have lost the tickets (or never received them in the first place). To alleviate the issue, families were advised that they could still come to their designated performance but ticketed families would be seated first. Non-ticketed families were permitted to take a seat afterwards as long as seating remained. This wound up working very well since no one tried to duplicate tickets and all of our seating was accounted for.

School Concert Seating For Audience Members

As you can see from this picture, the custodians did a fantastic job of trying to maintain safety. Families were permitted to bring two people. To accommodate, our custodians placed our chairs into groupings of 2 (each spaced 3 feet apart).

All four of my concerts contained less than 200 people in the audience. The biggest concert contained 170 people but most audiences were an average size of 150.

Unexpected Absences

Unexpected absences were my biggest stressor in planning a concert in 2021. I started to notice more unplanned absences in the weeks following Thanksgiving break. 48 hours before the first concert, I was notified that an entire class of students would be absent on concert day! This had a huge impact because I lost half of my chorus! In spite of this, my principal and I collectively decided that the show must go on.

Last Minute Subbing

I do not wish to scare anyone, but this was the most unanticipated part of the entire concert planning ordeal!

My school’s instrumental music teacher became suddenly unavailable – 24 hours before the concert!

Instead of cancelling, I assisted by conducting the instrumental (band and strings) in addition to the vocal portion I had already prepared.

Although I am a dual-major (flute and voice) this was still very stressful as I attempted to take on the role of two music teachers with very little time to prepare. Hopefully that does not become your situation, but don’t be surprised if you, a colleague, or your performers are suddenly unavailable! It’s the truth of the times we are living in as music teachers.

Take Aways

So what would I do differently? After reflecting on my planning and the unexpected events that occurred, I have decided to modify my planning for future pandemic concerts as follows…

• Spacing Concerts Out – Doing those four performances in one week was intense and I actually lost my voice in the process!
• Most Warm-Up/Tuning Time (especially for string instruments) – After subbing for my colleague, I realized the instrumental students needed more time for tuning. I am going to try to give them 30 minutes for the next concert!
• Unison for Smaller Ensembles – Due to the unpredictability of the times, I feel that ensembles with less that 10 people should plan to perform in unison in case of unexpected absences.
• I Bonded With My Students Even Though I Was Super Stressed – My students were amazing and wonderful as I took on the work of two music teachers! They completely understood while I ran around like a crazy person trying to help everyone. Here’s a fun selfie we took a few moments before the fourth and final concert 🙂

Looking for More Concert Planning Ideas?

Check out my past posts about Concert Planning for Music Teachers, Concert and Performance Etiquette and Concert Reflection!